@article{van Niekerk_Schäfer_Heid_2018, title={Semi-automating the Reading Programme for a Historical Dictionary Project}, volume={28}, url={https://lexikos.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/1468}, DOI={10.5788/28-1-1468}, abstractNote={<p class="AP">This paper describes the resources and software procedures used or developed in a major enabling step towards the revision of the scholarly reference work <em>A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles</em> (<em>DSAE</em>, Silva et al. 1996), namely the semi-automatic generation of a digitally-sourced lexical database on which new and updated dictionary entries will be based; as well as the addition, in parallel, of a new corpus of South African English (SAE) to the project. Drawing on online data sources and an extensive list of known SAE word forms, we have developed a software toolchain to gather, encode, annotate and collate textual sources, producing: (i) a 3.1-billion part-of-speech-annotated corpus of South African English; (ii) a lexical database of illustrative quotations for over 20,000 known SAE word forms, available for selection at the entry-revision stage; and (iii) a list of potential new variant spellings and headword inclusion candidates. These steps replace, where recent electronic sources are concerned, the mechanical aspects of quotation gathering, normally undertaken manually through a reading programme requiring years of teamwork to acquire sufficient coverage (cf. Hicks 2010).</p&gt;}, number={1}, journal={Lexikos}, author={van Niekerk, Tim and Schäfer, Johannes and Heid, Ulrich}, year={2018}, month={Dec.} }