Lexicography projects

People think of "the dictionary" as being a fixed and authoritative source of information. But

• in a sense, there is no such thing as a "the dictionary",
• a dictionary is a competitive commercial product, like other products,
• and too large and complex for one individual person to compile alone,
• though specialised dictionaries may be compiled by a single person with consultation of other experts to ensure consensuality.

So lexicography is always teamwork, with a division of labour basically among linguists and lexicographers, database producers, and publishers. Dictionary production is organised as an industrial project, and there are many of these, and many specialists in lexicography who work on such projects and act as consultants.

The research task in this class is to search for and document major dictionary projects world-wide, including

• publisher based projects (e.g. Longman, Oxford, Langenscheidt, Duden, ...)
• academic projects in various countries (e.g. GENELEX, MULTILEX, VerbMobil, EAGLES, ISLE, EMELD, ...)
• human language technology, natural language processing and computational lexicography projects for developing dictionaries for use in computer software (spell checker, thesaurus, grammar checker, ...)
• lexicographic consultancy companies like "Lexicon Masterclass" in Brighton.
• conferences and training schools on lexicography, such as EURALEX, Lexicom.
• some modern lexicographers and lexicon theorists such as Sue Atkins, Bran Boguraev, Ted Briscoe, Lynn Cahill, Nicoletta Calzolari, John Carroll, Walter Daelemans, Charles Fillmore, Dan Flickinger, Gerald Gazdar, Dafydd Gibbon, Nancy Ide, Adam Kilgarrif, Geoffrey Leech, James Pustejovsky, Laurent Romary, John Sinclair, Thorsten Trippel, Antonio Zampolli.
• ... and some web links.

The goals of this task are:

1. to attain an overview of the dimensions of modern lexicography,
2. to gain insights into project organisation, structures, procedures,
3. to find out about tools used in lexicography,
4. to discover the types of dictionary produced by lexicography projects.