Abstract: There are many benefits to using corpora. In order to reap
those rewards, how should someone who is setting up a
dictionary project proceed? We describe a practical experience
of such ‘setting up’ for a new Portuguese-English,
English-Portuguese dictionary being written at Oxford
University Press. We focus on the Portuguese side, as OUP did
not have Portuguese resources prior to the project. We
collected a very large (3.5 billion word) corpus from the web,
including removing all unwanted material and duplicates. We
then identified the best tools for Portuguese for lemmatizing
and parsing, and undertook the very large task of parsing it.
We then used the dependency parses, as output by the parser, to
create word sketches (one page summaries of a word’s
grammatical and collocational behavior). We plan to customize
an existing system for automatically identifying good candidate
dictionary examples, to Portuguese, and add salient information
about regional words to the word sketches. All of the data and
associated support tools for lexicography are available to the
lexicographer in the Sketch Engine corpus query system.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 6
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot