Computational Lexicography Research Articles

О современных тенденциях в лингводидактике и дидактике перевода

The article deals with the review of the reports, devoted to the problems of linguodidactics, the didactics of translation, cognitive translation studies, computer lexicography and hermeneutics of translation. Innovative approaches towards the practice of translation are connected with the use of computer programs (Trados, Multiterm, Idiom, Сatalyst, SDLX). Different types of competences, such as linguistic, poetic, cultural, semiotic and some others are in the focus of attention.

The potentials and limitations of modelling concept concreteness in computational semantic lexicons with dictionary definitions

This paper explores the feasibility of modelling concept concreteness perceived by humans and representing it in computational semantic lexicons, addressing an issue at the crossroads of computational linguistics, lexicography, and psycholinguistics. The inherent distinction between concrete words and abstract words in psychology has relied mostly on subjective human ratings. This practice is hardly scalable and does not consider the effect of polysemy. In view of this, we attempt to obtain a measure of concreteness from dictionary definitions comparable to human judgement, capitalising on conventional lexicographic assumptions and the regularities exhibited in the surface structures of sense definitions. The structural pattern of a definition is analysed and scored on a 7-point scale of concreteness ratings. The definition scores turned out to be quite effective for a dichotomous distinction between concrete and abstract concepts and more consistent with human ratings for the former. Beyond the two-way distinction, however, the results were more variable. The study has thus revealed the potentials and limitations of our approach, suggesting that different defining styles probably reflect the describability of concepts, and describability alone may not be sufficient for differentiating the degree of concreteness. The range of definition patterns has to be reconsidered, in combination with other inseparable factors constituting our perception of concreteness, for better modelling on a finer scale of concreteness distinction to enrich semantic lexicons for natural language processing.

Ortographic and Morphological Problems in Headword Identification, Selection and Presentation in ALLEX

This article discusses aspects of an on-going lexical computing project at the University of Zimbabwe, known as ALLEX, the acronym for African Languages Lexical Project. ALLEX is a collaborative, multi-faceted, long-term, computer-aided lexicography project that is intended to produce a series of dictionaries, glossaries and other language reference works in the indigenous languages of Zimbabwe, starting with the first ever monolingual Shona dictionary, which is already at an advanced stage of preparation, and which will also be the first corpus-based dictionary in Zimbabwe. The article confines itself to problems relating to word formation processes in Shona, specifically with reference to the lexicographers' need to ensure consistency in (i) identifying word forms as headwords in the running texts of the corpus, (ii) selecting from among these headwords to decide which ones to enter in the dictionary, and (iii) presenting the entries in the standard orthography. First, an outline is given of the project's background, objectives, priorities, guidelines and work in progress. The article then focuses on specific problems encountered, and discusses these, and some of the solutions, in the light of advances in computer lexicography, with particular reference to concordancing. It will become evident that the problems encountered by the ALLEX Team have to do with the unlimited capacity of the Shona language's basic and derivational word formation processes, which it shares with the other languages in the Bantu family. Therefore, it will be suggested that these problems, and the solutions that are being worked out, have much wider implications that go beyond Shona and Zimbabwe.

Lexicographical Problems in isiXhosa

Working on the lexicography of isiXhosa has led to the interesting experience of discovering that the description of the lexicon of isiXhosa poses innumerable challenges of both a semantic and a non-semantic nature. The problems encountered, some of which this article is an account of, include lack of understanding of the nature, depth and volume of work involved in compiling dictionaries, complexities idiosyncratic to the language itself, factors affecting consistency in methodology and other aspects, as well as extra-linguistic issues like orthography, finance, technology and relevant skills. Some of the problems rise from the very recognition of the fact that dictionaries play a significant role in ... eliminating obstacles in communication (Alberts 1992: 1) and the consequent desire or ambition to produce as perfect a dictionary as possible. Keywords: isixhosa, trilingual dictionary, multi-volume dictionary, cultural context, addenda, inclusion, authenticity, accuracy, language change, self created terms, indeterminacy, alphabetization, naturality, orthography, computer lexicography, research, language representativeness, language planning

Rufus H. Gouws, Ulrich Heid, Wolfgang Schweickard and Herbert Ernst Wiegand (Editors). Dictionaries. An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. Supplementary Volume: Recent Developments with Special Focus on Computational Lexicography.

The trilingual encyclopedia Dictionaries. An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography (edited by Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand and Ladislav Zgusta) was published between 1989?1991 in three volumes, consisting of a total of 335 articles divided into 38 chapters and printed on 3 355 pages including the index. The envisaged supplementary volume which will be published in English will consist of 22 chapters, containing 136 articles. This will not exceed 1 360 pages.

New advances in corpus-based lexicography

This article presents various approaches used in corpus-based computational lexico-graphy. A claim is made that in order for computational lexicography to be efficient, precise and comprehensive, it should utilize the method where the corpus text is first analysed, and the results of this analysis is then processed further to meet the needs of a dictionary. This method has several advantages, including high precision and recall, as well as the possibility to automate the process much further than with more traditional computational methods. The frequency list obtained by using the lemma (the equivalent of the headword) as basis helps in selecting the words to be in-cluded in the dictionary. The approach is demonstrated through various phases by applying SALAMA (the Swahili Language Manager) to the process. Manual work will be needed in the phase when examples of use are selected from the corpus, and possibly modified. However, the list of examples of use, arranged alphabetically according to the corresponding headword, can also be produced automatically. Thus the alphabetical list of headwords with examples of use is the mate-rial on which the lexicographer works manually. The article deals with problems encountered in compiling traditional printed dictionaries, and it excludes electronic dictionaries and thesauri. Keywords: lexicography, dictionary, language technology, computa-tional linguistics, automatic compilation, dictionary testing, informa-tion retrieval, morphological analysis, semantic analysis, disambigua-tion, heuristics

Orature and morpholexical deconstruction as lexicographic archaeological sites: some implications for dictionaries of African languages

This article takes a multidisciplinary approach to African lexicographic practice. It has as its primary premise the assumption that without words there can be no dictionaries to compile and discuss. Owing to this fact, the article focuses on a specific strategy for collecting words which belong in a special category of their own, namely archaic or obsolete words. Such words are important because of the need to mark them as such in any general purpose dictionary. Most, if not all dictionaries of African languages seem not to have this category, giving the misleading impression that there are no such words in African languages. Apart from digging up archaic or what we have also referred to as artefact words, the article also argues that the words have a substantial and intrinsic etymological value. Thus they can be used in specialised etymological dictionaries of African languages or even in standard general dictionaries. The multidisciplinary aspect resides in the methodology proposed for the recovery of archaic words. It is considered necessary that disciplines such as oral literature, oral history, historical linguistics and to a limited extent theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics, and, symbolically, archaeology and lexicography itself, be brought to bear on the subject of inquiry. The article is also an attempt at working out a method which African lexicographers can employ as an instrument to dig up artefact words for etymological and other such purposes. Hopefully the method can be refined further. Keywords: orature, morpholexical, deconstruction, reconstruction, archaeological sites, lexicography, African languages, dictionaries, diachronic, synchronic, historical linguistics, proverbs, riddles, idioms, oral traditions, mnemonic, etymology, archaic, shona, deverbative nouns, verb root, semantic, artefact words

Automatische Wortschatzerschließung großer Textkorpora am Beispiel des DWDS

In the past years a large number of electronic text corpora for German have been created due to the increased availability of electronic resources. Appropriate filtering of lexical material in these corpora is a particular challenge for computational lexicography since machine readable lexicons alone are insufficient for systematic classification. In this paper we show – on the basis of the corpora of the DWDS – how lexical knowledge can be classified in a more fine-grained way with morphological and shallow syntactic parsing methods. One result of this analysis is that the number of different lemmas contained in the corpora exceeds the number of different headwords of current large monolingual German dictionaries by several times.

Dictionaries. An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. Supplementary Volume : Recent Developments with Special Focus on Computational Lexicography. An Outline of the Project

Article Dictionaries. An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. Supplementary Volume : Recent Developments with Special Focus on Computational Lexicography. An Outline of the Project was published on August 28, 2007 in the journal Lexicographica (volume 22, issue 2006).

An evaluation of different statistical techniques of collocation extraction using a probability measure to word combinations

A collocation is a recurrent combination of words which appears more often than by chance. Collocations play an important role in many natural language processing tasks such as computational lexicography, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, information retrieval, etc. In this paper an attempt has been made to evaluate different collocation extraction techniques for a small corpus. For this purpose, some word pairs have been taken from the corpus and results of each technique have been shown and discussed. Finally, a probability measure has been suggested to filter out some free word combinations before applying these tests, which in turn improves the results obtained from the algorithms.

The first steps towards the automatic compilation of specialized collocation dictionaries

Collocation dictionaries are essential in specialized discourse for understanding, production, and translation. Especially translation, which is often undertaken by professionals who are not specialists of the field, is in need of dictionaries with detailed syntactic and semantic information on lexical and semantic links between terms. However, collocation dictionaries are hardly available for general, let alone specialized, discourse. The manual compilation of collocation dictionaries from large corpora is a time consuming and cost-intensive procedure. A (partial) automation of this procedure recently became a high-priority topic in computational lexicography. In this article, we discuss how collocations can be acquired from specialized corpora and labeled with semantic tags using machine-learning techniques. As semantic tags, we use lexical functions from the Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology. We explore the performance of two different machine-learning techniques, Nearest Neighbor Classification and Tree Augmented Bayesian Classification, testing them on a Spanish law corpus.

Frequency and Function of Characters Used in the Bangla Text Corpus

Empirical analysis of any natural language needs to be substantiated with the statistical findings because without adequate knowledge from statistics any linguistic study can fall into the quicksand of mistaken data handling and false observation. Recent introduction of various sub‐disciplines (computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, applied linguistics, lexicology, stylometrics, lexicography, and language teaching, etc.) requires various statistical results of language properties to understand the language as well as to design sophisticated tools and software for language technology. Keeping this in mind, we present here some simple frequency counts of characters found in the Bangla text corpus. Also, we empirically evaluate their functional behaviours in the language with close reference to the corpus. Here we verify previously made observations, as well as make some new observations required for various works of language technology in Bangla.

Exemples lexicographiques et métaphores

Antoinette Balibar-Mrabti : Lexicography and Metaphor The metaphorical verb classes in the dictionary "Les verbes français" of J. Dubois and F. Dubois-Charlier are presented. These classes are compared with the traitement of verbal metaphors in the lexicon-grammar of M. Gross. In both cases, the systematic coverage of metaphor and metonymy in rigorously defined sentence corpora is a part of the connections between lexicon and syntax made by the new discipline of computer lexicography. Because such metaphorical uses are incorporated in the dictionaries, they play a role in our culture insofar as norms and usage are concerned. Because such metaphorical uses are incorporated in the dictionaries, they play a role in our culture insofar as norms and usage are concerned.

Descriptive Analysis of the Drug Name Lexicon

The complexity of the drug use process is managed in part by developing systematic nomenclature for drugs. This nomenclature is cataloged in a variety of drug information databases. Answers to simple questions about the whole population of brand and generic drug names, however, are not easily obtained. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the drug name lexicon, with a primary (though not exclusive) emphasis on drugs marketed in the United States. Using the techniques of computational lexicography, one large database of trademark names (the US Patent and Trademark database) and one large database of nonproprietary names (the USP Dictionary of USAN and International Drug Names) were analyzed. Results describe a variety of distributional characteristics of drug names, including the number of characters per name, the number of syllables per name, and the number of words per name. Distributions of pairwise similarity and distance scores for a large sample of names are provided, as are lists of the 25 most common initial and terminal bigrams and trigrams. The information should be of interest to trademark attorneys, patient safety advocates, regulators, and students of drug nomenclature.

Fishing for Translation Equivalents Using Grammatical Anchors

Bilingual parallel corpora offer a treasure house of human translator’s knowledge of the correspondences between the two languages. Extracting by automatic means the translation equivalents deemed accurate and contextually appropriate by a human translator is of great practical importance for various fields such as example-based machine translation, computational lexicography, information retrieval, etc. The task of word or phrase level identification is greatly reduced if suitable anchor points can be found in the stream of texts. It is suggested that grammatical morphemes provide very useful clues to finding translation equivalents. They typically form a closed set, occur frequently enough in sentences, have more or less fixed meanings, and, most important, will stand in a one-to-one or at most one-to-few relationship with corresponding elements in the other language. This paper will explore the viability of the idea with reference to the Hungarian and English versions of Plato’s Republic, which are available in sentence-aligned form. Hungarian has a rich set of suffixes which are typically deployed in a concatenated manner. Corresponding to them in English are prepositions, auxiliary words, and suffixes. The paper will show how, by starting from a well defined set of correspondences between Hungarian grammatical morphemes and their equivalents and using a combination of pattern matching and heuristics, one can arrive at a mapping of phrases between the two texts.

Automating the Lexicon: Research and Practice in a Multilingual Environment

Computational lexicography is a fast-growing field with implications for a wide range of disciplines-theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence-as well as for the construction of dictionaires. The 'Grosseto Workshop' was an event which broke new ground. It brought together for the first time an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers concerned with computational lexicography. These papers, selected from the workshop, have provided a baseline and a reference point for further research on problems associated with the lexicon. The collection is not merely of historical interest: it addresses many issues that are still debated today and that guide current research and development.

Computational Lexicology and Lexicography: Bibliography

Computational Lexicology and Lexicography: Bibliography

A new method for analysing downloaded data for strategic decision

Technology assessment survey is nowadays a specific and scientific subject that any manufacture needs for increasing productivity. This function was initially reserved to experts of the studied field. But the increase of information volume has called for a change. Now, we need specialists of technology assessment survey which know about sophisticated methods to extract strategic information from downloaded data. We will explain how to build strategic information. We present here a new and original method of data analysis. This Factorial Relational Analysis is born after 15 years of IBM France mathematics research center works on qualitative data analysis. The method is based on Relational Analysis. The particularity of this method is to work with sparse matrices and to obtain the best classification without anya priori fixation of number of classes. Relational Analysis is used in other sectors than the analysis of matrices issued from downloaded data. For example it is also used in computational lexicography or in credit scoring or in any domain where classification is concerned. Here we choose to present an example of an application in patent analysis.

Introduction

Introduction William Frawley J. he Montague tradition (1974 and after; Montague, Formal Philosophy. New Haven CT: Yale UP) makes a clear distinction between semantics and lexicography. The former concerns the nature and very possibility of meaning and is basically a branch of mathematics . The latter involves cataloging actual meanings and is, if anything , a kind ofapplied psychology. Semantics is to lexicography what economics is to accountancy. What an orderly, fenced-off landscape! In the dozen or so years that I have been going to lexicography conferences and reading and writing for the journals, I have often found myselfin the Great Montague Divide. But it is my doing, having criticized lexicographers without fully recalling the conditions under which they have to work. (Is there a practicing lexicographer out there willing to own up to the converse?) Tension manifests itself among those who make dictionaries for a living (practicing and practical lexicographers ) and those concerned with what dictionaries should or could be (theoretical lexicographers, for want of a better term). For unity and progress, I offered to oversee a forum on the connections and antagonisms between theory and practice. I asked a semanticist and a dictionary maker, each well respected, influential, and inclined to commentary on the other's field, to write lead papers outlining the basic issues in lexicography from their respective standpoints . I also invited commentary on these papers from six others. (Actually many more than six, but a number ofthose invitations fell to the usual interferences of the profession—overcommitment, sabbatical year, etc.) I then asked the authors of the lead papers to respond, if they wished, on those commentaries. (One of the lead authors thought it best not to make final comments.) I chose these particular contributors because I was certain that they would say interesting things. I was not worried about getting a William Frawley balanced sample of the field, and in truth none of the contributors is wholly theoretical or practical. I suppose, then, that I left myselfopen to the charge that I cast the invitation net too narrowly. But, frankly, I would rather learn a whole lot from a little than learn a little from a whole lot. The forum can be read from beginning to end in a couple of sittings and yield profit all along the way. I thought it best to exercise little control over the content of the contributions. But I did circulate a number of questions to help the contributors focus on the issues and get started. Here are some of those questions: 1.What are the principal issues that inform practical lexicography? 2.Is a practicing lexicographer the same as a practical one? 3.Is practical lexicography the same as commercial lexicography? 4.What does the term theoretical lexicography mean? Lexicalsemantics! Computational lexicography? 5.Does practical lexicography already have its own (in-house) theoretical lexicography? 6.What is "boiler plate" in a dictionary? What can and must be changed? 7.How can theoretical lexicography be used in actual practice? 8.What theoretical proposals are useless for practical lexicography? 9.Is computational lexicography more a tool than a guide to practice? 10.Where are theoretical and practical lexicography incommensurable (and thus immune to disputes)? 1 1 . Is circularity, a favorite bugaboo of theoreticians, a non-issue in dictionary making? 12.Aren't appeals to the market, the user, production schedules, and budget not very good reasons for the practicing lexicographer's limitations? 13.Where must theoretical and practical lexicographers work together for progress? Where have they worked well together? And what counts as progress in lexicography anyway? 14.Is cooperation between theory and practice more likely with certain kinds of dictionaries? 15.Can legitimate critiques of dictionaries be made by those who have never worked as lexicographers per se? As for the answers, I will let the papers speak for themselves. But let me at least set out the terrain a bit by commenting on the contributors ' tactics. Atkins's style is panoramic. She gives us the working Introduction dictionary-maker's catechism (though my feeling is that Atkins, like Wierzbicka, wants to improve definitions, too— but would also like to improve theoreticians' views ofwhere, how, and why they can...

Computational Lexicography for Natural Language Processing

Introduction / B. Boguraev and E. Briscoe -- Placing the dictionary on-line / Alshawi, B. Boguraev, and D. Carter -- An independent analysis of the LDOCE grammar coding system / E. Akkerman -- Utilising the LDOCE grammar codes / B Boguraev and E. Briscoe -- The derivation of a large computational lexicon o English from LDOCE / J. Carroll and G. Grover -- LDOCE and speech recognitio D. Carter -- Analysing the dictionary definitions / H. Alshawi -- Meaning an structure in dictionary definitions / P. Vossen, W. Meijs, and M. den Broede -- A tractable machine dictionary as a resource for computational semantics Y. Wilks ... [et al.] -- Conclusion / B. Boguraev and E. Briscoe -- Appendic : Lexical database-user guide -- Semantic types of LDOCE verbs -- Dative alternations -- Lexicon development environment-user guide -- The Longman semantic codes -- The Longman grammar coding system.