This is a tutorial paper on lexical knowledge representation techniques that are applicable in lexicons that provide phonetic or phonological representations for words, rather than orthographic representations. Because the semantic and syntactic levels of lexical description are largely neutral with respect to phonology versus orthography, we do not consider them here. Instead, we concentrate on the morphological, morphophonological and phonological levels of description, levels of representation which are less often considered in NLP. Much of the field continues to operate under the assumption that natural languages correspond to sets of strings of orthographic characters.
We present all our example analyses in the DATR lexical knowledge representation language. For segmental phonological representation, we use the SAMPA machine-readable phonetic alphabet. And for our natural language data, we use English and German.
