Oxford Dictionary of English - current developments

Oxford Dictionary of English: Current Developments James McCracken Oxford University Press mccrackj@oup.co.uk Abstract This research note describes the early stages of a project to enhance a monolingual English dictionary database as a resource for computational applications. It consid- ers some of the issues involved in deriving formal lexi- cal data from a natural-language dictionary. 1 Introduction The goal of the project is to enhance the database of the Oxford Dictionary of English (a forthcoming new edition of the 1998 New Oxford Dictionary of English) so that it contains not only the original dictionary content but also additional sets of data formalizing, codifying, and supplementing this content. This will allow the dictionary to be ex- ploited effectively as a resource for computational applications. The Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) is a high-level dictionary intended for fluent English speakers (especially native speakers) rather than for learners. Hence its coverage is very extensive, and definitional detail is very rich. By the same token, however, a certain level of knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader, so not every- thing is spelled out explicitly. For example, ODE frequently omits morphology and variation which is either regular or inferable from related words. Entry structure and defining style, while mostly conforming broadly to a small set of basic patterns and formulae, may often be more concerned with detail and accuracy than with simplicity of expla- nation. Such features make the ODE content rela- tively difficult to convert into comprehensive and formalized data. Nevertheless, the richness of the ODE text, particularly in the frequent use of exam- ple sentences, provides a wealth of cues and clues which can help to control the generation of more formal lexical data. A basic principle of this work is that the en- hanced data should always be predicated on the original dictionary content, and not the other way round. There has been no attempt to alter the origi- nal content in order to facilitate the generation of formal data. The enhanced data is intended primar- ily to constitute a formalism which closely reflects, summarizes, or extrapolates from the existing dic- tionary content. The following sections list some of the data types that are currently in progress: 2 Morphology A fundamental building block for formal lexical data is the creation of a complete morphological formalism (verb inflections, noun plurals, etc.) covering all lemmas (headwords, derivatives, and compounds) and their variant forms, and encoding relationships between them. This is being done largely automatically, assuming regular patterns as a default but collecting and acting on anything in the entry which may indicate exceptions (explicit grammatical information, example sentences, pointers to other entries, etc.). The original intention was to generate a morpho- logical formalism which reflected whatever was stated or implied by the original dictionary content. Hence pre-existing morphological lexicons were not used except when an ambiguous case needed to be resolved. As far as possible, issues relating to the morphology of a word were to be handled by collecting evidence internal to …

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