Large-scale Lexicography in the Digital Age

• Published in: International Journal of Lexicography 2014-12, Vol.27 (4), p.378-395
• Main Author: Fellbaum, C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0950-3846; 1477-4577
• DOI: 10.1093/ijl/ecu018

The Digital Revolution has significantly impacted lexicography on several levels. First, freedom from the traditional paper format has removed constraints on size and format, paving the way for the construction of ever larger lexical databases with multi-faceted, flexible and rich representations of word meaning and use that have been unfeasible for print dictionaries. Second, access to electronic text corpora provide a solid empirical base and allow the lexicographer to craft entries that reflect actual speaker usage, variations across genres and the dynamics of continuous language change. Corpora have moreover opened the possibility to explore and statistically measure on the distributional properties of word and encode their syntagmatic properties. Third, different resources (lexicons, annotated corpora, language-independent, formal ontologies, syntactic and frame-based resources, Wikipedia) can be interlinked and harmonized. Fourth, electronic dictionaries can be continuously updated by a large community of both experts and volunteers, independently of official releases of new editions. All these make it possible to test, on a large-scale and crosslingually, the viability of different theories of lexical meaning and the structure of the lexicon. We discuss these aspects of digital lexicography with a particular emphasis on WordNet. Adapted from the source document