[Lexicog] a question about profession

[Amsler, Robert]

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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