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In this article we would like to show how we conceived the description of the word débat in the Dictionnaire d’apprentissage du français langue étrangère ou seconde ( Dafles), an online semi-multilingual learner’s dictionary of French intended for learners at an intermediate or advanced level. We successively present the delimitation of the different senses ( lexies) and the definition style we used, the syntagmatic relations (word syntax and word combinations) and the paradigmatic relations (e. g. the synonyms). For each of these points, we stress the need of a corpus analysis. For the Dafles project we use a corpus of press texts from three important French speaking communities with more than 75 million words. We also compare exhaustively our data with the data found in the most important dictionaries of collocations of French available at this moment. The comparison focuses not only on the selection of the collocations, but also on their modeling.