This contribution examines the digital revolution in lexicography from the perspective of the dictionary user. We begin with an observation that in the information age the status of the dictionary is changing, and so are patterns of user behaviour, with general internet search engines encroaching on the grounds traditionally reserved for lexicographic queries. Clearly, we need to know more about user behaviour in the digital environment, and for this we need to harness user research, to find out how the increasingly flexible and adaptive lexical reference tools of the future need to behave to best accommodate user needs. We summarize the existing findings and show in what ways digital dictionaries are already able to serve users better than their paper predecessors. The challenge to produce efficient and effective dictionaries is best seen in the context of dictionary users' reference skills, which now tend to overlap with digital literacy. We conclude with a possible vision of the future.
Corpora have given rise to a wide range of lexicographic resources aimed at helping novice users of academic English with their writing. This includes academic vocabulary lists, a variety of textbooks, and even a bespoke academic English dictionary. However, writers may not be familiar with these resources or may not be sufficiently aware of the lexical shortcomings of their emerging texts to trigger the need to use such help in the first place. Moreover, writers who have to stop writing to look up a word can be distracted from getting their ideas down on paper. The ColloCaid project (www.collocaid.uk) aims to address these problems by integrating information on collocation with text editors. In this paper, we share the research underpinning the initial development of ColloCaid by detailing the rationale of (1) the lexicographic database we are compiling to support the collocation needs of novice users of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and (2) the preliminary visualisation decisions taken to present information on collocation to EAP users without disrupting their writing. We conclude the paper by outlining the next steps in the research.
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists' construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.We would like to dedicate this paper to our colleague Frieda Charalabopoulou, who died, following a long struggle with cancer, between its writing and its publication.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.