Lexical markup framework: an ISO standard for electronic lexicons and its implications for Asian languages

Lexical markup framework (LMF) is the ISO standard for representing machine-readable dictionaries (MRD) and natural language-processing lexicons. The formal specification has been officially published in 2008 under the reference ISO-24613:2008 after a 5-year study and series of meetings gathering 60 lexicon managers and linguists coming from various cultures and languages. The ISO document contains a formal specification under the form of a Unified Modeling Language accompanied with a selection of examples of word description in Asian, European, Semitic and Turkish languages. Afterward, the model has been applied to a couple of African languages. In this current text, after a brief introduction of LMF, we present some difficult challenges which are required to represent a selection of Asian languages, especially in the context of dictionaries in general and MRD in particular.