Lexicography

Extended article comments in online dictionaries

Rufus H Gouws — 2022-12-14

Online dictionaries offer many new options to lexicographers, including an innovative way of dealing with dictionary structures. Looking at articles in different dictionaries but especially at those in one online dictionary, this study focuses on the presentation and structuring of article comments. Both comments on semantics and comments on form as well as subcomments on semantics are discussed. In multi-layered articles, the different restricted articles accommodate different layers of subcomments. These subcomments are integrated into the higher level subcomment and together they constitute a new search position, namely, a search tunnel. Such a tunnel contains downwardly expanded as well as upwardly attached restricted articles. The allocation of all data relevant to one specific sense of a polysemous word to one search position enhances articleinternal cohesion and deviates from a traditional strict division between the comment on form and the comment on semantics. It is shown how lexicographers can employ article comments in a functional and innovative way.

A classroom-based study on the effectiveness of lexicographic resources

Esra Abdelzaher — 2022-11-25

Machine-readable databases such as FrameNet (based on frame semantics) and WordNet (based on lexical semantic relations) appeared in the 1990s and became part of the lexicographic scene. The current study argues that FrameNet and WordNet can contribute to addressing the lexicographic challenge of sense delineation and elicit better performance from learners of English as a second language. The study examined the decoding and encoding performance of university students (n = 48) after exposure to modified lexicographic entries from FrameNet, WordNet, and the online Oxford Learner’s Dictionary. The classroom experiment assessed the accuracy of sense selection, user perplexity, and the accuracy of synonym production, and measured the response time for each question. An online survey followed the test, in order to collect further information about students’ dictionary use and evaluation of guide words and definitions. Results revealed significant intergroup differences in the response time, perplexity level, and encoding performance. Learners who consulted the modified FrameNet-based entries were the fastest and most successful among the three groups. Future studies can benefit from simplifying the name of frames in FrameNet and modifying the microstructure of the database for pedagogical purposes.

SANTI-morf dictionaries

Prihantoro — 2022-11-25

This article highlights the structure of dictionaries used in SANTI-morf (Sistem Analisis Teks Indonesia – morfologi), a multi-module pipeline system that performs annotations for an Indonesian corpus at the morpheme level and built using NooJ (Silberztein, 2003, 2016). SANTI-morf dictionaries, together with other SANTI-morf components, enable the system to tokenize each word in an Indonesian corpus into morphemes (e.g., cliticized and non-cliticized roots, affixes, reduplications) and associate these morphemes with their corresponding tags. Each entry in the SANTI-morf dictionary is encoded with a tag composed of morphological analysis (MA) labels. In most cases, these labels are combined with system implementation (SI) labels. Morphological analysis labels consist of formal and functional morphological criteria labels and are typically used for searching the annotated corpus (e.g., root part of speech (POS) labels). System implementation labels are used for system implementation and are mostly of interest to developers rather than end users. They include morphotactic and morphophonemic constraint labels, which are processed when the monomorphemic entries in dictionaries work together with SANTI-morf grammars (rules).

Creation of multilingual learners’ e-dictionary for learners of Asian languages

Marijana Janjić — 2022-12-15

With the advent of technology, electronic dictionaries have become an important variety of available tools for learning languages. Our research team developed an online learner’s dictionary, named eRjecnik, with basic entries for learning Hindi and Sanskrit, next to those for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. This e-tool was developed with reference to two key elements: (1) an analysis of existing e-dictionaries and their structure, and (2) an analysis of the dictionary usage habits among students enrolled in a language class of one of the above-mentioned languages, as well as among learners who had finished their studies. The goal of this study was to analyze data and develop an e-dictionary that can help students study their respective languages. As a result, a free learner’s e-dictionary that can incorporate student input has been designed, allowing cross-language searches as well as comparative searches between several languages. The article presents an overview of a student survey that was conducted as a preliminary step to the building of eRjecnik.