For example in Spanish you would have to include every single conjugation of a verb, plus all the clitics for the infinitive and gerund (ex, "darle", "darselo", "escribiendole"). Someone told me that they simply generate all the combinations, but I can't see this working for a language with a lot of declension and conjugation.
Also, how do dictionaries handle German compound nouns?
Posted Apr 1, 2012, 8:30 PM UTC
I as a German i may be able to answer the compound noun question:
They don't.!
If a compound makes it into dictionary is bound to two criteria: how common/used is it and how obvious is it.
If the word is very common and pretty much essential it gets in the dictionary. For (bad) example: Fingernagel - finger nail.
If the word is not obvious, it changed the meaning of its compounds very much, its gets in the dictionary. For (bad) example: Bahnhof - Train station - (lit. track court), Bahn in its first (standalone) meaning just means (predetermined)"path" , Hof just means yard, or curt, anything that is a space next to a building actually. The meaning cant be guessed easy anymore.
I Think you got a slight misconceptio in your question anyway. Dictionaries are not generated by machines, they have to be put in manually, by humans.
Whitaker's Words is an online dictionary which accomplishes this very task for Latin, which I would say is much more inflected than Spanish. And it works! If you type in any form of any word, it not only spits out the roots and actual word, but also identifies what form you put in.
As for how much of a bitch it must have been to do this: I can only imagine.