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Chapter 19 - Natural Language Processing in Lexicography

from Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Dictionaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
C. Paul Cook
Edited by
Sarah Ogilvie
Sarah Ogilvie
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter discusses the current role of natural language processing in lexicography, and considers how this might change in the future. It first considers the shared history of natural language processing and lexicography with respect to statistical methods. It then discusses how natural language processing is applied to pre-process corpora to support lexicographic analysis, identify collocations in corpora, automatically construct thesauri, and select good dictionary examples. It also discusses the natural language processing tasks of word sense disambiguation and induction and their relationship to lexicography, and very recent neural network-based methods for automatically generating definitions. It concludes by discussing specialised types of dictionaries that can currently be automatically constructed, and considers whether dictionary construction could ever be fully automated.

Keywords

natural language processingartificial intelligence (AI)computational linguisticscomputational lexicographyCorporaMarkov modelSketch English,taggingparsingcollocationspointwise mutual information (PMI)distributional thesauriword sense disambiguationfuture of lexicography
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries , pp. 240 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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