Lars Trap-Jensen
Lexicography between NLP and linguistics: aspects of theory and practice
Abstract
Over the last hundred years, lexicography has witnessed three major revolutions: a descriptive revolution at the turn of the 20th century, a corpus revolution in the second half of the 20th century, and the digital revolution which is happening right now. Finding ourselves in the middle of a radical change, most of us have difficulties orienting ourselves and knowing where all this is leading. I don’t pretend to know the answers but one thing is clear: we cannot ignore it and carry on as normal. In this article, I will discuss how lexicography and natural language processing can mutually benefit from each other and how lexicography could meet some of the needs that NLP has. I suggest that lexicographers shift their focus from a single dictionary towards the lexical database behind it.
