[Lexicog] The future of our field, Part 1

Sun Nov 11 14:47:44 UTC 2012

[ Apologies for cross-postings. ]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Macmillan's announcement to stop the presses and move to the non-printed
dictionary went viral on the Internet. Of course, there was always going to
be some polarisation. We expected to see a spread between cynics and
enthusiasts in the general media, but some of us were surprised at the
emotions displayed in the professional discussion groups. Our discipline
doesn't often make it into the news of the general media in any meaningful
way, so that was good. Michael Rundell's blog post (here
<http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/bye-print-dictionary> ) had already
been viewed over 5,000 times before the end of the week, liked close to 400
times and tweeted over 100 times. The You Tube version of the news (here
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j4o9_SKOYc> ) was seen about 3,700 times,
liked 41 times and disliked twice.  A general news search reveals literally
hundreds of comments . The seven-odd professional discussion groups each had
their own dynamics in dealing with the news, and the comments also travelled
from one list to the next. Allow me to repost two messages to the Euralex
list now (the initial threads went from the DSNA list, to the Afrilex list,
on to the Lexicography list, with copies to a few others). I wish to repost
them as they offer glimpses of what Simon Krek coined the non-printable
dictionary (as opposed to the mere non-printed). The posts are by none other
than Robert A. Amsler and Ken Litkowski. Mention is also made of various
networks (WordNet, FrameNet, etc.), as well as the work by such giants as
Igor Mel'čuk and Patrick Hanks. While on the topic, I would like to
pre-announce the December special issue of the International Journal of
Lexicography (under embargo for another three weeks). In it, Thierry
Fontenelle masterfully revisits these and other semantic networks dear to
lexicographers. (Also in the December issue, Patrick Hanks revisits the
corpus revolution, and Rufus Gouws looks into metalexicography. There are
four further papers in the special issue; more on those later.)

So, then, here goes, Bob Amsler's reaction:

-----Original Message-----
From: amsler at cs.utexas.edu [mailto:amsler at cs.utexas.edu] 
Sent: vrijdag 9 november 2012 16:55
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com; Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
Cc: slandau1755 at verizon.net; DSNA at yahoogroups.com; afrilex at freelists.org;
asialex at freelists.org; lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com;
ishll at lists.le.ac.uk; lexicografie at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] RE: [afrilex] Re: [DSNA] FW: Macmillan's recent
announcement

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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