HelexKids 2.0: A linguistically annotated lexical database building on HelexKids

Abstract HelexKids 2.0 represents an annotated expansion of the original HelexKids, a word frequency database compiled from Greek and Cypriot elementary school textbooks. This article presents the extended annotation methodology employed to enrich the database with part-of-speech tags, phonological properties (syllable count, phonetic transcription, orthographic and phonological syllabification, and stress), and morphological features (case, number, gender, and inflection class for nouns). All original frequency and lexical measures are retained, and new ones (e.g., PLD20, bigram and biphone frequencies) are added. The annotation process combined automated tools with extensive manual annotation and expert verification. We redesigned the database to assemble dynamically from the full set of textbooks, delivering results on the fly. The annotated database comprises 67,802 types and over 1.3 million tokens. We report on stress pattern distributions across major parts of speech and grade levels, show how stress is distributed by word class, and provide hierarchies of word-level syllabic templates. HelexKids 2.0 is freely available through the GRADIENCE project webpage and serves as a valuable resource for psycholinguistic and morphophonological research, as well as for educational applications.