230100 Computergestützte Lexikographie -- Computational lexicography (Do 10-12)

Class notes

Lexicography is defined as the making of dictionaries, and knowledge in this area is an essential part of the training of any language expert, whether a teacher, a translator or interpreter, a terminologist, or a professional in the publishing industry.

For several decades lexicography has become increasingly dependent on the use of computers, which have, essentially, three functions in this context:

1. The processing of text banks (text corpora) to extract words and their contexts from actual examples; in order to obtain reliable information about usage, these corpora have to contain hundreds of thousands of words, and cannot be processed without the aid of computers.
2. The construction of lexical databases with the results of lexicographic analysis of texts.
3. The production of usable dictionaries based on word forms (standard dictionaries), meanings (thesauri) or contexts (concordances).

We will be concentrating mainly on the second and third aspects, and for the sake of simplicity we will treat the Internet as a ready-made `text bank' and select texts for lexicographic treatment from there.

No knowledge of computers and programming is required, but participants should be familiar with the use of email and the World Wide Web, and should have an Internet account at the University Computer Centre. For those interested in acquiring a basic knowledge of dictionary programming, a range of basic techniques will be introduced; for those who are not, a number of ready-made programmes, including an easy-to-use lexical database programme, will be available.

Reading recommendations will be available on my Web site:
http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/Classes/Winter98/

The very enterprising can check out the HyprLex Web site.