Computational Lexicography Research Articles

Progress in English computational lexicography

: This paper is a progress report of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary project. The project, initiated in 1979–1980, pioneered modern computing techniques in lexicography research. The acronym COBUILD used for the project stands for Collins the publishers, and Birmingham University International Language Database. This report discusses the corpus—a collection of 20 million words of text—and presents the historical, theoretical and methodological bases for the project. This report briefly discusses how, for example, the following issues concerning the data were tackled: meaning, grammar, definitions and explanations, and examples. In addition to discussing the main compilation process, this paper also discusses how structural forms of the language are related to meanings and uses, and how considerations of frequency affect the description. The special problems related to indication of stress and rhythm are also discussed. This paper concludes with observations on the wider implications of the COBUILD project.

Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives

This book constitutes an interesting guide to recent developments in vocabulary studies. As will be made clear below, this review addresses researchers and others interested in issues concerning computational morphology and lexicography in a Machine Translation (MT) environment. For this reason we focus more on relevant chapters of the book than on those which concern pure language teaching and language learning issues. The book is divided into three parts. Part one contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of lexis with a particular emphasis on its role in discourse contexts. Part two consists of three chapters dealing mostly with issues related to language learning, language teaching and lexicography. Part three includes two case studies in lexical stylistics based on informant analyses. Chapter 1 explores the notion of word. A definition based on orthographic criteria (i.e. a word viewed as a sequence of letters bound on either side by a space or a punctuation mark) is taken into consideration. Nevertheless, it is observed that such a definition is violated by the existence of a great number of multi- word units (e.g. instead of, post box, etc.). On the other hand, the phonological criterion for defining a word as a string of phonemes containing only one stress is also not felicitous, firstly because it only concerns spoken language and secondly because a stress can be used as a demarcator of strings for emphatic purposes. Other problems relate to the existence of several forms for only one lexical meaning (e.g. verbal allomorphs of the same inflectional paradigm: bring, brings, brought, bringing), as well as to the appearance of the same form for different meanings (e.g. the different meanings of the word/a/r). The case of idioms (e.g. to kick the bucket) involving more than one text word which, semantically, can be substituted by a single word is also problematic. In attempting to provide a good criterion for defining a word, Carter uses the valuable concept of lexeme which helps to override most of the problems mentioned above (e.g. the existence of different form variants for the same word). He correctly observes that are the basic contrasting units of vocabulary in a language. When we look up in a dictionary we are looking up lexemes rather than words (p. 7).

Descriptive tools for electronic processing of dictionary data: Studies in computational lexicography

Descriptive tools for electronic processing of dictionary data: Studies in computational lexicography

Computational Lexicography and Computational Linguistics

Computational Lexicography and Computational Linguistics

Micro-concord: A language learner's research tool

Micro-concord is a simple interactive KWIC (keyword-in-context) concordancing program that runs under a variety of configurations on the Spectrum home microcomputer. Based on the proposition that CALL (computer-assisted language learning) should, if it is to make maximum use of the possibilities opened up by the new technology, involve more than simply making the computer a sort of surrogate teacher or trainer (Higgins, J. and Johns, T. Computers in Language Learning, Collins 1984), it offers both language learners and language teachers a research tool for investigating “the company that words keep” that has hitherto usually been available only on mainframe computers to academic researchers in such fields as computational linguistics, lexicography, and stylistics (Hockey 1980).

Computational lexicography

Computational lexicography