Connecting a French Dictionary from the Beginning of the 20th Century to Wikidata

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2548–2555 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2548 Connecting a French Dictionary from the Beginning of the 20th Century to Wikidata Pierre Nugues Lund University Lund, Sweden pierre.nugues@cs.lth.se Abstract The Petit Larousse illustr´e is a French dictionary first published in 1905. Its division in two main parts on language and on history and geography corresponds to a major milestone in French lexicography as well as a repository of general knowledge from this period. Although the value of many entries from 1905 remains intact, some descriptions now have a dimension that is more historical than contemporary. They are nonetheless significant to analyze and understand cultural representations from this time. A comparison with more recent information or a verification of these entries would require a tedious manual work. In this paper, we describe a new lexical resource, where we connected all the dictionary entries of the history and geography part to current data sources. For this, we linked each of these entries to a wikidata identifier. Using the wikidata links, we can automate more easily the identification, comparison, and verification of historically-situated representations. We give a few examples on how to process wikidata identifiers and we carried out a small analysis of the entities described in the dictionary to outline possible applications. The resource, i.e. the annotation of 20,245 dictionary entries with wikidata links, is available from GitHub (https://github.com/pnugues/petit_larousse_1905/). Keywords: entity annotation, entity linking, digital humanities 1. Introduction The Petit Larousse illustr´e is a one-volume dictionary of French, first published in 1905. Its ambition was as much cultural as linguistic with numerous illustrations and encyclopedic developments accompanying the def- initions of words, things, and people. It was also a truly popular dictionary with, for instance, a sense order that followed the sense frequency and not the word history. As a consequence, this dictionary was a true commer- cial success and became ubiquitous in French homes. From its first edition, this dictionary has been annually updated until today and has kept a far-reaching cultural influence. 1.1. The Petit Larousse Illustr´e The Petit Larousse illustr´e stems from two main pre- vious encyclopedias: A large one, the Grand diction- naire universel du XIXe si`ecle in 15 volumes and two supplements, published between 1866 an 1876 and a shortened and illustrated version of it: The Nouveau Larousse illustr´e in seven volumes and a supplement from 1897 to 1904. While an offspring of them, the Petit Larousse illustr´e has a completely new structure and format: It consists of one compact and portable volume, divided into three parts. These parts are of unequal sizes: 1. The first one, langue franc¸aise, is a dictionary of French with some encyclopedic content. It is re- stricted to the common nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and grammatical words (1066 pages); 2. The second part, locutions, contains quotes, mostly from classical Latin authors. It is much smaller than the two other parts (32 pages); …

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