The Dutch language institute: Towards a comprehensive digital language infrastructure

The Dutch Language Institute: towards a comprehensive digital language infrastructure. The traditional role of academic lexicographic institutes was to document and provide a historic record of a national language through the description of its vocabulary based on authoritative sources of attested language use. They provided society with a public monument of cultural heritage. However, in the last decades, the role of these lexicographic institutes has expanded. At their core, they still document language use for the benefit of the entire language community but the scope and purpose has diversified. They do not only make dictionaries, but also compile other linguistic resources like corpora, thesauri and language processing tools. Their purpose is not just to create a historic record but also to provide practical resources for researchers, companies and other users. These resources are not only useful in the field of linguistics, but also in the much broader field of the digital humanities, AI and NLP. In this presentation, the shift towards a fully integrated “knowledge database” of Dutch that will be the backbone of the digital language infrastructure of the Dutch Language Institute will be explained. From this central knowledge database, a multitude of resources can be generated for specific purposes and specific target audiences. At the same time, the institute works on a fully integrated grammar portal and a portal for dialects and regional languages.