[Lexicog] dictionary software

[Gilles-Maurice de Schryver]

Dear LexList Members,

The dictionary compilation software TshwaneLex (
http://tshwanedje.com/tshwanelex/) was mentioned in several messages
yesterday, and in earlier postings there have been requests for comparative
studies of such tools.

Questions about available dictionary compilation software indeed recur every
now and then on various mailing lists. To go back in time a bit, in
September 1989 Pieter Masereeuw (University of Amsterdam) posted a query to
the 'Humanist Discussion Group', and was offered two packages: Compulexis
(at that time 20,000 pounds) and Lexware (which has been mentioned on the
LexList too). A decade later, in April 2001, Tadeusz Piotrowski (Opole
University) tried to collect information regarding lexicographer's
workbenches from readers of the 'Corpora List'. The thread was not followed
up. In September 2002, in a list specifically dedicated to the discussion of
electronic dictionary software, namely 'ELEX-L', J.L. De Lucca (University
of Sao Paulo) wanted to hear about dictionary creation software used
elsewhere. Suggestions included:

  XML using TEI in Emacs.
-- Charles Muller (Toyo Gakuen University)

  Debian GNU/Linux
  SGML parser tools SP (mainly nsgmls)
  KornShell93
  tr, (e)grep, sed, flex, mawk, m4
  pbyacc (Berkeley yacc with host language Perl)
  sort, tsort
  GNU Emacs, psgml
  NoSQL (Rand RDB descendant on Linux)
  Microsoft (MS) Windows
  ToolBook Instructor
  MS Web Browser (ActiveX) Control
  MS Script Control
  PerlScript (ActiveX) scripting engine
-- Dirk Frömbgen (University of Cologne)

  Languages: Perl, C++, NLP++, VB, Java, Tcl
  Applications & Utilities: TeX, sed, awk, grep, FileMaker Pro, MySQL,
Excel, Word
  Standards: PDF, SGML, XML, XSLT
-- Baden Hughes (University of Melbourne)

This prompted Adam Kilgarriff (University of Brighton) to comment: "While
these are all salient for various aspects of dictionary-making, they fall
far short of being an environment designed to help lexicographers
efficiently produce a large, coherent and consistent dictionary. Most
lexicographers are not programmers, and want a single tool for writing a
dictionary which takes care of the growing lexical database in such a way
that they need not think about it, but can get on with the job of analysing
meaning and writing entries."

>From this it would seem that off-the-shelf software applications for
dictionary compilation are unfortunately few and far apart. Comparative
studies of such tools moreover seem to be still in the making. It would also
appear as if most dictionaries from around the world continue to be compiled
with ad hoc tools.

Large dictionary publishers such as Collins of course simply build their own
in-house systems; others such as Longman or Oxford base their latest
lexicography environments on rather complex million-dollar applications that
are specifically customised for them. Most field linguists on this
discussion list use the tools developed by SIL International. There have
been attempts to produce off-the-shelf lexicographic workbenches in the
past, examples include GestorLEX and Onoma, yet these products still needed
quite some customisation and investments before they could be used in any
real-world dictionary project.

It is against this background that David Joffe and myself felt the need to
create TshwaneLex, a robust, truly off-the-shelf, modern dictionary
compilation program with which any dictionary maker(s) can compile reference
works for any language(s). One of the primary design goals behind the
development has been to produce a user-friendly tool: the software should be
easy to learn and as intuitive as possible to use. Another important
underlying design philosophy has been that any lexicography tasks that can
reasonably be automated by computer software, should be.

For those of you who will attend EURALEX 2004 in July (
http://www.univ-ubs.fr/euralex2004/), know that TshwaneLex will be
demonstrated there and will also be covered in a paper dealing with various
applications that revolve around the TshwaneLex online dictionary module.

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
Ghent University & TshwaneDJe HLT
http://tshwanedje.com/
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