[Lexicog] Digest Number 343

[Allan Johnson]

Thank you for bringing up this topic.  The distinction between form-based
and meaning based dictionaries is something we've come up against here in
the Philippines.  Here we've followed a standard that makes the sense
primary, with part of speech and specific word forms beneath it in the
hierarchy. The MDF standard on the other hand makes specific word forms
primary, with part of speech and sense lower in the hierarchy.  In our
experience so far, we've found that a PLB dictionary can't easily be
reworked and printed out as an MDF dictionary, and same for an MDF
dictionary - it can't easily be adapted to our PLB format for publication.

But I've noticed in working with LinguaLinks that one of its strengths is
flexibility of output format.  If five years into the compiling of a
dictionary I re-think what I want the output to look like, I can adjust the
preferences and, for instance, tell it that I want example sentences to be
placed before lexical relations instead of after.  And that's all it takes.
No tedious re-editing of all the existing entries.

So I'm wondering how far this flexibility could take me.  Given an MDF
dictionary that I want to publish in PLB format, could I import it to
LinguaLinks, rearrange the entry parts, and then export it to PLB format?
If this is a possibility, it would provide a wonderful solution to some
difficult dictionary publication problems that we have come up against.  My
hunch is that LinguaLinks' flexibility won't take me quite this far.  I'd
like to experiment with it and see how far it can go in transforming the
shape of an entry.  But first I want to ask whether any of you have tried
this already and found an answer.

Allan Johnson


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Digest Number 343


> John Roberts wrote:
> > Well, one of the main issues on structuring your database is whether
you
> > decide to have a form-based dictionary or a meaning-based dictionary.
>
> This is an excellent example!
>
> So--let me try to provoke some discussion here.  I would say that a good
> database design would allow you to avoid this issue until it is time to
> print (or otherwise publish) the dictionary.  That is, the database
> design should be compatible with both of these kinds of dictionaries,
> and either should be available as a "view" of the database.  I believe
> (someone may correct me) that this was one of the design factors of both
> the LinguaLinks database, and perhaps more explicitly in the FieldWorks
> database.
> --
> Mike Maxwell
> Linguistic Data Consortium
> maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu



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