[Lexicog] Interesting lexical discoveries

[Patrick Hanks]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 3:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Interesting lexical discoveries


> Patrick Hanks wrote:
> > 3. Collocational patterns seem obvious when pointed out, but are not
> > easily called to mind. From this I conclude that social salience
> > (what we actually do with language) and cognitive salience (what we
> > think and say that we do) are independent variables.  If this is
> > right, introspection is a flawed research technique -- downright
> > misleading, in fact.
>
> I would think that introspection can be used in collocation research in
two
> ways: thinking up examples, and figuring out the relations among given
> examples.  As you say, the former is subject to omission.  But I suspect
> that the latter is downright necessary.
>
> More generally, I suspect any lexicographic technique, used by itself, is
> flawed and misleading, corpus searches included.
>
> There's an interesting comment on page 185 of Manning and Schutze's
> Foundations of Statistical NLP:
>
>     It is instructive to look at the types of collocations
>     that a purely linguistic analysis of text will discover
>     if plenty of time and person power is available so
>     that the limitations of statistical analysis and computer
>     technology need be of no concern.
>
> They then show some collocation results from the BBI Combinatory
Dictionary
> of English, and further comment:
>
>     Naturally, the quality of the collocations is also
>     higher than computer-generated lists -- as we
>     would expect from a manually produced
>     compilation. [!]
>
> On pg. 187, they mention work by Church et al on "a program of
computational
> lexicography that combines corpus evidence, computational methods and
human
> judgement to build more comprehensive dictionaries that better reflect
> actual language use."
>
> In sum, I suspect the key to in-depth lexicography lies in some such
> combination of human and computer effort, exploiting the strengths of each
> (including, if I may say so, human intuition and introspection).  J. C. R.
> Licklider would have loved it.
>
>     Mike Maxwell
>     LDC
>     maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu
>
>
>
>
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