[Lexicog] RE: [afrilex] Re: [DSNA] FW: Macmillan's recent announcement

Sat Nov 10 20:45:41 UTC 2012

As a fellow computational lexicologist, I would like to second Robert's 
suggestions and add a few more, inside and outside the box.

Inside the box, we examine the content the lexicographers have provided 
us. Thus, all of Bob's suggestions, and there is probably more. In about 
1995, in a chat with George Miller, he lamented that he could only 
include a relatively small number of relations (compared to previous 
work he had done). Perhaps we could look to the full battery of 
Mel'cuk's lexical functions, as well as still other unmined data (e.g., 
dates for encyclopedic entries of people).

Outside the box, we can attempt to incorporate recent efforts that are 
not usually included in standard lexicographic practice. For example, 
Patrick Hanks, in his efforts at corpus pattern analysis, is including 
ontological values for verb arguments, reflecting the patterns he sees. 
This moves us into the linguistic domain, capturing arguments as in 
VerbNet. And still further, we reach the frame semantics of FrameNet. 
FrameNets are mushrooming for non-English languages as well. Wouldn't it 
be nice to see, not only definitions of words in context, but also the 
frame elements that we should expect in examining a word. Atkins & 
Rundell have provided a glimmer of this in their guide to "practical 
lexicography."

Here's to a superdictionary of the future.

     Ken

On 11/9/2012 10:55 AM, amsler at cs.utexas.edu wrote:
> I feel I should add something to this discussion...
>
> I'm a computational lexicologist. My interest has been in the use of
> computers to study the contents of 'machine-readable dictionaries', a
> term I coined in 1980 in my dissertation on The Structure of the
> Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary. (That work, in turn, led to George
> Miller producing WordNet).
>
> Electronic dictionaries have only partially achieved their potential
> because they have only expanded their access capabilities in fairly
> minor ways despite an avalanche of new computational capabilities.
> Fundamentally, electronic dictionaries "think" of themselves as print
> dictionaries being offered via electronic access. This is a very
> limiting vision.
>
> The work I did on the analysis of dictionary definitions demonstrated
> that there was an imperfect, yet intriguing, taxonomy of definition
> texts and showed that the alphabetic organization of dictionary
> entries was outmoded except under special circumstances. I.e., for
> example, you had to know how to spell a word to look it up; you had to
> know a word existed that dealt with the meaning you were trying to
> express to know to how to look it up; and when you did look a word up
> you were given a tiny view of the dictionary's contents that didn't
> show you the other words whose definitions were related to the entry
> you were examining in terms of taxonomic relatives. Sure, some
> dictionaries did an excellent job of including information on synonyms
> (Merriam-Webster's "synonym paragraphs" come to mind, for their
> inclusion of defining differences in text explanations; but NONE gave
> taxonomic or part/whole related headwords).
>
> Electronic dictionaries offer new capabilities in terms of now
> providing one-at-a-time retrieval of entries based on words within
> definitions; provide for word game options such as finding anagrams of
> words. Algorithmic techniques such as the SOUNDEX system allow finding
> words based on their sounds instead of their spellings (something that
> Google seems better at than electronic dictionaries).
>
> But fundamentally, dictionaries as isolated islands of knowledge, are dying.
>
> Wikipedia offers "disambiguation pages" that extend beyond what is in
> any dictionary, print or electronic. They engage in post-modern
> lexicography in which proper nouns ('named entities' in the
> computational linguistic community's jargon) share the likelihood of
> being what a user is interested in looking up instead of just lexical
> headwords. I remember my shock at discovering that in the Brown Corpus
> the word "TIME" most often referred to the name of a magazine and not
> any of the senses in a dictionary....
>
> Web search engines have implemented "definition" as a search box
> keyword that retrieves multiple web site hits giving the definition of
> terms. Some (duckduckgo.com) have even taken to assuming that a
> definition is the fundamental information to retrieve for any isolated
> keyword entered into a search box. The dictionary as a specifically
> evoked search is intuitively determined from the query string.
>
> I doubt users will for long want to go to one publisher's web site and
> then learn their specific interface all just to look up one unknown
> word to get one publisher's take on its meaning... unless they are
> interested in a very specialized type of knowledge such as definitive
> etymological knowledge or a very specialized form of display. The pace
> of new vocabulary has made most print dictionary publisher's web sites
> antiquated.
>
> So, where does the future of lexicography lie. I believe it lies in
> the development of new lexical knowledge resources, new ways to
> display existing dictionary information and in connecting dictionary
> information to other knowledge.
>
> For example. What would the dictionary look like if Google search
> handled dictionary lookup? You'd have best match for strings of
> keywords to a dictionary entry. You'd have sponsored links displayed
> atop the free search hits. Sponsored links aren't all bad; it depends
> on their relevance. If, for example, sponsored links went to the
> titles of books related to the word or meaning being looked up, this
> could be a good thing. I have often wondered how many of the headwords
> in a dictionary have books with that title or books whose content is
> about one of their sense definitions. If entries linked to government
> publications or public service information or news stories for words
> currently in the news it could be a good thing as well.
>
> Of course, the problem here is that Wikipedia and Google and Amazon
> already exist and they are all too eager to take the leap toward
> incorporating dictionary information into their search results.
>
> What isn't yet done may well be done by web-based companies. However,
> in some ways dictionaries excel in what they do.
>
> (1) Compaction of information. The dictionary entry may be the most
> complex bit of typography ever devised. It involved more fonts and
> formatting clues than any other type of text I've encountered. This
> hasn't been well exploited by dictionaries in their electronic
> interfaces. For example, if one could do arbitrary string search
> through a dictionary's entries one could find similar entries to an
> existing entry just based on the syntax of highly compact strings. No
> need to detail what one is looking for, find me more entries that
> contain: "n 1 cap:" (headwords whose 1st sense is a capitalized word)
> or "<professor ~" (words that appear in example sentences following
> 'professor' as 'emeritus') or "`path-thik\" (the last part of the
> pronunciation of "homeopathic" used as a query for find words that end
> in similar pronounciations).
>
> Note that in all these cases these are very incomplete strings taken
> from actual definition entries being used as queries in a very simple
> string search algorithm and not a highly structured search query that
> required weeks and months of programming of an interface to allow
> users to ask such questions about dictionary content. It's a "find me
> more entries that contain this" query. And it works because of the
> rigorous highly complex syntax print dictionaries have developed over
> decades of evolutionary advances.
>
> (2) defining formulae. Dictionaries employ similar defining styles
> across entries with related content. Yet, they don't allow the user
> convenient access to those defining formulae so they could retrieve
> definitions based on their use. In part, I suspect this resulted from
> handing separate lexicographers the task of defining all the entries
> of certain groups of words such as animals, occupations, vehicles,
> etc. It might be useful to be able to see the definitions that were
> written for a given defining formula. Defining formulae are more
> complex than can be retrieved by string searches since they employ
> natural language that allows arbitrary numbers of adjectives and
> and/or combinations to use the same formula. The underlying formula
> would have to be identified to link together all definition texts that
> used it.
>
> (3) beyond one-at-a-time retrieval of dictionary entries. The
> information science community has long used techniques such as
> keyword-in-context to display search results as a concordance.
> Electronic dictionaries have a very annoying habit of assuming that
> readers want to read entries retrieved as one-at-a-time formatted
> entries shown as they would appear in the printed book. NO, not all of
> us do and many of us can read a KWIC listing more efficiently to see
> what is going on across all entries that will match a query's results
> displayed together, one result per line, formatted for horizontal
> alignment of their shared text.
>
> So... what to do. Either get busy dying or get busy living as the saying goes.
> Dictionary publishers need to start figuring out how to live on the
> web as a participant of their environment or figure out how to offer
> their polished content in ways that don't currently exist. It isn't
> quite a matter of whether it's a book, an online interface, or a
> wireless interface, it's what it displays that is useful. It's a
> matter of either having lexical knowlege that nobody else has or
> displaying lexical knowledge in ways that are so convenient that other
> means of access are less attractive.
>
> There... now I've managed to offend as many people as possible...
>
> Dr. Robert A. Amsler
> Computational Lexicologist
> Vienna, Virginia
>
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> ------------------------------------
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-- 
Ken Litkowski                     TEL.: 301-482-0237
CL Research                       EMAIL: ken at clres.com
9208 Gue Road                     Home Page: http://www.clres.com
Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA       Blog: http://www.clres.com/blog

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