From data to dictionary: corpus-based lexicography, past, present - and future?
Michael Rundell
Macmillan Dictionaries
Dictionaries are more about language than about words. But how do dictionary-writers know what to put into a dictionary, and where does that information come from? This seminar will look at changes which have revolutionised the dictionary business in recent decades and made us redefine what we mean by "dictionary" - from the arrival of large language corpora and smart corpus-querying systems, through the automation of many aspects of lexicography, to the ongoing migration of dictionaries from print to digital media, and the opportunities offered by the Web for crowdsourcing and other new features. Following the "corpus revolution" which began in the 1980s, we are now in the middle of another revolution, as dictionaries become part of a bigger environment: "search". Whether they will survive in anything like their current form is anybody's guess.