[Lexicog] RE: [DSNA] The future of our field, Part 1

[amsler at CS.UTEXAS.EDU]

Do yuu have the quote?


Quoting "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>:

> Note that, contrary to what Mr. Amsler says, the term   
> "machine-readable dictionary" was not coined in 1980, but appeared   
> in print at least as far back as 1973.
>
> Fred Shapiro
> Editor
> YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS (Yale University Press)
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: DSNA at yahoogroups.com [DSNA at yahoogroups.com] on behalf of   
> Gilles-Maurice de Schryver [gillesmaurice.deschryver at UGent.be]
> Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2012 9:47 AM
> To: euralex at freelists.org; afrilex at freelists.org;   
> asialex at freelists.org; lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com;   
> DSNA at yahoogroups.com; lexicografie at googlegroups.com;   
> hllnet at lists.le.ac.uk
> Subject: [DSNA] The future of our field, Part 1
>
> [ 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'èuk 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
>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
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