[Lexicog] a question about profession

[CAROLINE REUL]

Hi All,
   
  I'm new to the list also, so I'm glad to see who's out there and to introduce myself.
   
  I do mostly commercial bilingual lexicography for a German publisher, working principally with the language combinations German/English, though I've also worked on Portuguese, Spanish and French projects, all combined with English - nothing as exotic as what many of you do but still lexicography nonetheless. Unfortunately, I do this freelance, so it's an on-and-off kind of thing.
   
  I also have a MA in computational linguistics, and have done work on (bilingual) semantic hierachies for the purpose of automatic translation as well as automatic document and website classification. I wrote my thesis on the representation of idioms (using fairly strict formal criteria for distinguishing these from collocations and other fixed phrases as defined by Mel'cuk and others) with local grammars in electronic lexica. I used Unitex for this which was developed under Maurice Gross at the LADL in Paris. 

  I agree fully with Robert, that fixed phrases have not received the attention they deserve, though the German dictionary company I work for has given a great effort to gather these somewhat systematically and more importantly has attemted to develop semi-formal criteria for identifying and typographically representing different types of fixed phrases. I have recently been involved in trying to convince a very well-respected American dictionary company the value of this, but am not sure I've succeeded. 
   
  Caroline Reul
  
"Amsler, Robert" <robert.amsler at hq.doe.gov> wrote:
  Re: Professions. By discipline I'm a computational linguist, but on this
list I'd say I'm a computational lexicologist. I started my career in
CompLex by writing a dissertation titled "The Structure of the
Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary," which was, in 1980, about the
largest machine-readable dictionary we could manage to analyze at the
University of Texas in Austin. I extracted, with some help from National
Science Foundation funding, the taxonomic structure of the dictionary
for nouns and verbs, linking them by the kernels of their definitions
until one assembled "trees" out of the whole collection in the pocket
dictionary. This was, it should be noted, a goal established by John
Olney before me, so I can't take credit for the idea, just for finally
managing to complete the trees. That pointed me toward working with
lexicographers since I was curious how dictionaries came to be. That in
turn pointed me toward corpus building and then corpus annotation.

These days I practice my craft helping the Department of Energy create
tools to assist in analyzing electronic documents for their contents,
based on figuring out what words and phrases indicate about that content
and trying to coax disambiguated meaning out of lexical entities using
various techniques. 

My current interests are in multi-word expressions and what I perceive
as their neglected status in published dictionaries. I'm also interested
in tasks such as automating the construction of dictionaries from
corpora, and in using comparative analysis of the phrases occurring in
text corpora from different but related domains as a means to identify
properties of the two corpora and predict properties of individual
documents.

One question I've been intending to post is, "What is the difference
between jargon and slang?" Is it merely one of generality, from
specialty professions to the general public? I.e., do mathematicians
have both slang and jargon in their writings? Or is jargon professional
and slang un-professional, even if specific to a narrow community such
as mathematicians?



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