EDR's productions

In April 1996, the Japan Electronic Dictionary Research Institute (E.D.R) was created to realize an electronic dictionary for use in advanced NLP research. To build it the company received funds from the Japan Key Technology Center and eight major computer manufacturers : Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, Sharp, Toshiba, Oki Electric, Mitsubishi Electric and Matsushita Electric. The project lasted for 9 years, between 1986 and 1994, and led to the creation of five independent dictionaries:

• Japanese dictionary It is a 250,000 words dictionary that contains for each word morphological information (pronunciation, accent, etc...), syntactic information (grammatical characteristics, aspect etc...) and semantic information (sense explanation and links to all concepts involved).
• English dictionary With the same philosophy as the Japanese dictionary, this 190,000 words dictionary defines for every word the concepts that can be attached to it as well as morphological (e.g. inflection, adjacency, pronunciation, accent), syntactic (e.g. POS, countability) and semantic information.
• Technical dictionary This dictionary specialized in information processing contains 120,000 Japanese words and 90,000 English words.
• Concept dictionary This original dictionary describes and classifies the set of 400,000 concepts needed to fully understand the meaning of each word. The classification is based on supra/super relationships. The description contains binary semantic relationships between concepts (e.g. agent/action or object/action)
• Bilingual dictionary
• Co-occurrence This is a table that contains information about the possibility of word sequences inside sentences, and about concept collocations.
• Japanese and English corpus This corpus is made of 220,000 Japanese and 160,000 English sentences. Each sentence is morphologically, syntactically and semantically parsed.

These dictionaries have been used to develop the morphological parser JUMAN at Kyoto University. Since 1996, E.D.R. has joined the ANSI Ad-Hoc Group for Ontology Standards and is trying to link its dictionaries with Wordnet.

In July, 1998, the cost to buy the dictionaries was 100,000 JPY (around 1,000 USD) for universities and 1,200,000 JPY (around 12,000 USD) for companies.