In this introduction, basic concepts of lexicography have been provided as background to the understanding of the context within which the other papers have been written. Lexical signs and lexical structure were focussed on as a basis both for discussing lexical representations, with examples of formalisms and database structures, and for outlining some basic first steps in lexicographic text stream processing under UNIX.
A number of important areas could not be discussed in detail, in particular issues of statistical corpus processing and extraction of lexical categories from corpora, lexical machine learning, and statistical `training', but several aspects of these areas are discussed in [Adda-Decker & Lamel (this volume)] and [Daelemans & Durieux (this volume)]; another area is that of large-scale written lexicon development of the kind underlying popular commercial paper lexica.
In conclusion, a number of promising areas of computational lexicography which are currently emerging will be discussed briefly.