Speaker
Affilliation
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd
Abstract
The Sketch Engine is a general-purpose corpus query tool for linguists, lexicographers and language technologists. Its distinguishing feature is "word sketches", one-page, corpus-driven summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. The Sketch Engine web service gives access to very large corpora for many of the world's major languages.
The talk will take the above as given, and will discuss work we have been doing recently on three fronts:
* Semi-automatic dictionary-drafting (SADD): we have implemented the idea behind the WASPS project - integrating lexicography and WSD through assigning collocates to word senses - in the Sketch Engine, and hope to use the method shortly on production scale
* GDEX (Good dictionary examples): we can now score corpus sentences so that the best candidates for dictionary examples get the highest scores. The work builds on a long history of work on 'readability', and has already been applied in two commercial dictionaries. It also has implications for the use of corpora in language teaching.
* Evaluating word sketches: word sketches are now nine years old, and they generally get very positive reviews, but there have not to date been any objective evaluations. We are now setting this right, with a developer perspective for German, and with a user perspective across six languages.