language technology
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 07, 2012
Another conference report, this time from the first Asia-Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC), recently held in Auckland, New Zealand. Corpus linguistics involves using corpus data as the raw materials for studying language – so in a sense, dictionary-writers are the ultimate corpus linguists. But while the e-Lexicography conference we covered a few months ago focussed [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 13, 2012
The lexicographer’s rule of thumb is that things always take longer than you expect. Samuel Johnson underestimated the time it would take him to complete his dictionary, and James Murray – the original Editor of the OED – fared even worse in the prediction business: what started as a 10-year project took over 40 years [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 08, 2012
In the previous post on this topic, we looked at the criteria traditionally applied by dictionary-makers when considering new words for inclusion. The question is as old as lexicography itself. When he wrote his Plan of an English Dictionary in 1747, Dr Johnson noted that it is ‘not easy to determine by what rule of [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 02, 2012
In Kate Atkinson’s recent novel, Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), there’s an exchange between two of the characters. When one of them mentions a large sum of money, we read that Kelly, the other character, ‘suddenly meerkatted to attention’. Does this mean we have a new verb on our hands, to meerkat? Should it be [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 18, 2012
The Macmillan Dictionary got a mention in The Guardian yesterday, when Jane Martinson pondered the use of the word simper. A fellow journalist (male) had tweeted about a lawyer (female) ‘simpering’ at a witness (male) in the ongoing Leveson Inquiry. (The inquiry was set up in the wake of revelations that News International journalists had [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 06, 2012
In a recent post, we saw that the word jargon – while more or less synonymous with terminology – has a much more negative feel. As always, you can tell a lot about a word by the company it keeps, and a comparison of the adjectives that frequently collocate with these two nouns is revealing. [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 17, 2011
At the recent eLEX 2011 conference in Slovenia (for earlier posts, see here and here), the discussion focussed on the future of dictionaries – or, more broadly, on the various ways in which reference needs might be catered for in years to come. What often happens in this field is that people working in universities [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 11, 2011
More news from eLEX2011, the conference on e-lexicography currently taking place in Slovenia. The conference got off to a rip-roaring start as Simon Krek (one of the organizers) outlined a radical vision for a future in which a range of intelligent language tools would be freely available to make communication easier. The functions Simon mentioned [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 09, 2011
Today’s post comes from the beautiful Slovenian city of Bled, where I’m attending a conference called ‘eLEX2011’– or ‘Electronic lexicography in the 21st century’. Regular readers will be aware of how completely the job of producing dictionaries was transformed in the 1980s by the arrival of large language corpora. Those were pioneering times, and the [...]
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Posted by Caroline Short on September 23, 2011
This week’s ‘language in new media’ post is one of the fantastic TED Talks. What we learned from 5 million books uses Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer tool to tell us why exactly a picture is worth so much more than a thousand words! If you’re new to the Ngram Viewer, you might also like to [...]
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