Semi-automating the Reading Programme for a Historical Dictionary Project

  • Tim van Niekerk Dictionary Unit for South African English, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
  • Johannes Schäfer Department of Information Science and Natural Language Processing, University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany
  • Ulrich Heid Department of Information Science and Natural Language Processing, University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany
Keywords: corpora, dictionary workflows, historical lexicography, language varieties, lexical databases, reading programmes, South African English

Abstract

This paper describes the resources and software procedures used or developed in a major enabling step towards the revision of the scholarly reference work A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (DSAE, 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).
Published
2018-12-17
How to Cite
van Niekerk, T., Schäfer, J., & Heid, U. (2018). Semi-automating the Reading Programme for a Historical Dictionary Project. Lexikos, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.5788/28-1-1468
Section
Artikels/Articles