The Hunting of the BLARK – SALDO, a Freely Available Lexical Database for Swedish Language Technology Lars Borin, Markus Forsberg Lennart Lönngren University of Gothenburg University of Tromsø Department of Swedish Department of Russian For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t Be caught in a commonplace way. Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t: Not a chance must be wasted to-day! (Lewis Carroll: The Hunting of the Snark) 1 Introduction Among Anna Sågvall Hein’s numerous professional interests, computational morphology and the lexicon were among the very earliest. Her implementation of a full computational inflectional morphological processor for Russian was the topic of her PhD thesis (Sågvall, 1973). In the 1980s, she headed the LPS project 1 at the University of Gothenburg. A summary description of her work in the LPS project, on a computational lexicon for parsing is found in Sågvall Hein 1988. Among her most recent research interests, on the other hand, is the creation of a research infrastructure for Swedish language technology, more specifically a Swedish BLARK 2 (see below). Against this background, what would be more appropriate than to dedicate this article about a lexicon component of a Swedish BLARK to Anna? The need for a basic research infrastructure for Swedish language technol- ogy is increasingly recognized by the language technology research commu- nity and research funding agencies alike. At the core of such an infrastructure is the so-called BLARK – Basic LAnguage Resource Kit. A planning project funded by the Swedish Research Council has been set the tasks of defining 1 A Lexicon-oriented Parser for Swedish. 2 See, e.g., Anna Sågvall Hein and Eva Forsbom: A Swedish BLARK, presentation at BLARK workshop, 29th January 2006, GSLT retreat, Gullmarsstrand, Sweden 〈http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/ ∼ bea/blark/sveblark060129.pdf〉. 21