EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY
EURALEX NEWSLETTER
Editors: Carla Marello and Rosamund Moon. Address for correspondence and contributions:
Carla Marello
Corso Unione Sovietica 115
I-10134 Torino
Italy
This quarterly Newsletter is intended to include not only official announcements but also news about EURALEX members, their publications, projects, and (it is hoped) their opinions, and news about other lexicographical organizations. Please try to support this by sending newsletter contributions to Carla Marello at the above address, or e-mailing the editors.
| winter (December) | 15 September |
|---|---|
| spring (March) | 15 December |
| summer (June) | 15 March |
| autumn (September) | 15 June |
The URL of the EURALEX web site is http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex.
Les points suivants se sont dégagés à l'issue de la réunion:
1.
IJL et EURALEX sont ouverts aux contributions des
lexicographes francophones. Les présentations en
français sont permises lors des congrès d'EURALEX. Des
articles et des comptes rendus apparaissent
régulièrement en français dans IJL.
2.
Pour favoriser le rayonnement de la production hexagonale
dans notre domaine, les éditeurs de dictionnaires et les chercheurs
spécialistes du domaine ont été invités
à envoyer des exemplaires de leurs ouvrages à
l'éditeur chargé des comptes rendus dans IJL.
3.
Ce fut l'occasion de rappeler aux participants les
conditions extrêmement favorables qui permettent aux membres
d'EURALEX de bénéficier de la revue. Le rôle utile
du Bulletin (Newsletter), qui sert d'organe de liaison entre les
membres, a également été mentionné, ainsi
que la publication annuelle de la liste des membres et de leurs
adresses.
4.
Les informations disponibles sur le site web d'EURALEX ont
été décrites en détail. (Ces informations
détaillées ont été communiquées aux
participants à ce déjeuner sous forme de compte rendu et
peuvent l'être à toute autre personne
intéressée.)
5.
L'accent a été mis sur la valeur inestimable
que représente l'assistance à un congrès
d'EURALEX pour un jeune chercheur ou un jeune lexicographe,
étant donné la richesse et la diversité des
programmes de conférences, ateliers, démonstrations, et
autres tutoriels.
6.
L'idée d'un numeró spécial d'IJL
entièrement consacré à la lexicographie
française des 50 dernières années a
suscité beaucoup d'enthousiasme. Jean Pruvost en assurerait la
coordination.
7.
Des informations concernant EURALEX et IJL seront
distribuées lors de la prochaine `Journée du
dictionnaire' organisée par Jean Pruvost en mars 2001 à
Cergy-Pontoise.
A lunchtime meeting in Paris on 10 June 2000 was the occasion of a wide-ranging and fruitful discussion between Tony Cowie and Thierry Fontenelle (both representing EURALEX and the International Journal of Lexicography) and Dominique Le Fur (Le Robert), Héloïse Neefs (Lernout & Hauspie/Mendez), and Jean Pruvost (Université de Cergy-Pontoise). The chief purpose of our coming together was to encourage a closer involvement of French lexicographers in the Association and in the Journal, and a number of proposals were put forward which would, we hoped, have the effect of bringing the achievements of French lexicography before a wider public and of strengthening the ties which already exist between a number of its leading figures and EURALEX.
The following key points emerged from the discussion:
1. IJL and EURALEX welcome contributions from French-speaking
lexicographers. Presentations in French are a feature of EURALEX
congresses; articles and reviews in French regularly appear in IJL.
2. To increase awareness of French publications in the field,
dictionary publishers and academic researchers are encouraged to send
copies of their books to the Reviews Editor of IJL.
3. Those present were reminded of the favourable terms under
which members of EURALEX received copies of IJL. The useful role of
the Newsletter as a notice board for members was also mentioned, as
was the annual publication of a list of the membership.
4. Information available on the EURALEX web site was
detailed. (Note that the relevant addresses will be circulated, as
part of the minutes, to those attending the meeting and to other
interested French colleagues.)
5. Great emphasis was laid on the value to young researchers
and lexicographers of attendance at EURALEX congresses, with their
varied programmes of papers, workshops, demonstrations, and tutorials.
6. The idea of a special number of IJL, to be entirely devoted
to French dictionaries of the past fifty years, and with Jean Pruvost
as guest editor, was warmly welcomed.
7. Information about EURALEX and IJL will be distributed at the
next `Journée du dictionnaire', to be organized by Jean Pruvost
in March 2001 at Cergy-Pontoise.
Tony Cowie (IJL/EURALEX) and Thierry Fontenelle (EURALEX/IJL)
This conference was organized through the Università del Piemonte Orientale, and coordinated by Elena Ferrario and Virginia Pulcini, with participation by leading experts in the field. It offered a moment of reflection on the present state and on the future of bilingual dictionaries (BD): those basic tools for translation and linguistic study. The European languages involved were Italian, French, English, Spanish, and German.
The first two sessions dealt with print dictionaries, while the third focused on computers in the field of lexicography. Two eminent scholars opened the first session of the conference. Franz Josef Hausmann (La lexicographie bilingue en Europe: peut-on l'améliorer?) observed that, while some dictionaries have reached a very high standard, thanks to judicious balancing of the information content of entries, clarity in sense discrimination, and precision in the indication of equivalences, many others still have progress to make. Henri Béjoint (Towards a bilingual dictionary for comprehension) argued that it was necessary to overcome the present orientation of BDs, angled exclusively towards translation, and he proposed the production of dictionaries specifically designed for comprehension. Marie Fourment Berni Canani (Neutralisation, cumul et généralisation en bilingual lexicographie) analysed three problematic aspects (found in Italian-French BDs in particular, but more generally present in all dictionaries) that is neutralization, accumulation and generalization, and explained the drawbacks for the user. Maria Teresa Prat Zagrebelsky (Una guida alle guide all'uso dei dizionari bilingui italiano-inglese, inglese-italiano) demonstrated the needs for training in dictionary use, in order to exploit it fully as a pedagogical tool for linguistic study.
The second day of the conference was devoted to more specific aspects of bilingual lexicography. Virginia Pulcini (Pronunciation in English-Italian bilingual dictionaries) examined the phonetic information in some recent Italian-English BDs, underscoring limitations in the recording of American pronunciation, variable pronunciations, and other aspects of contextual variation of spoken English. Maria Victoria Calvi (Alcune riflessioni sulla lessicografia bilingue italo-spagnola) provided a rounded portrait of Italian-Spanish lexicography, studying particularly the problem of `false friends' in these two `similar' languages. Laura Salerno (Information grammaticale et lexicographie bilingue: le traitement de la complémentation verbale dans cinq dictionnaires italien/français), examined the way in which some Italian-French BDs treat verbal complementation, and pointed out various inaccuracies which it is desirable to eliminate. Another very important topic in bilingual lexicography is idiomatic expressions, which Luisa Giacoma discussed with respect to Italian-German lexicography and translation equivalence in BDs (Le espressioni idiomatiche come problema lessicografico, con particolare riferimento al confronto interlinguistico italiano-tedesco).
The session of the conference devoted to electronic BDs aroused great interest. Carla Marello (Dizionari bilingui: sempre più stazioni di transito) highlighted the limitations of electronic BDs currently available, and the necessity of using these alongside other more versatile reference tools, that is monolingual dictionaries and electronic corpora. Umberto Capra (La simmetria nei dizionari bilingui e altri fastidi ai tempi del computer) dealt with symmetry between the sections of BDs and discussed a possible method of lexicographic compilation based on an electronic database of parallel corpora. Vito Pirrelli (Per un superamento della dicotomia Lessico-Grammatica: aspetti monolinguistici e multilinguistici di composizionalità "debole" nel linguaggio) illustrated the concept of indirect or weak compositionality at morphological and phraseological levels in the light of computational linguistics, and the consequence of this for crosslinguistic comparisons. Finally Emanuele Lana (Prendere ELDA per il verso giusto. La consultazione di un database valenziale) illustrated a trilingual database of Italian verbs, analysed according to valency and accompanied by equivalents in English and German.
The Conference ended with a round table coordinated by Maria Grazia Margarito, with Franz Josef Hausmann, Henri Béjoint, Carla Marello, Marie Fourment Berni Canani, and Vito Pirrelli.
Virginia Pulcini
Elena Ferrario
Membership in ISRALEX is open to those interested in dictionaries of any kind --- monolingual, bilingual, semi-bilingual, multilingual, specialized, didactic, electronic, etc. --- and is free of charge.
The first public meeting was held on Tuesday, 20 June, at 11 am, at the Academy for the Hebrew Language, located at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Giv'at Ram. There were twenty-one people present. Dr Mordechai Mishori talked about the work of the Academy, and gave a lecture on the historical dictionary that is currently under way at the Academy --- a major lexicographic project of enormous dimensions. Admission was free.
To find out more about the Association, or to join, please contact ISRALEX at the address given below.
Lionel Kernerman (kernermn@internet-zahav.net)
KERNERMAN PUBLISHING LTD
46 Hagolan St., Tel Aviv 69718
POB 13113, Tel Aviv 61131, Israel
Tel: +972 3 6492715
Fax: +972 3 6493712
A special feature of InterLex is that three afternoons are devoted to practical sessions in which participants, individually or with colleagues, present their latest research in 10-20 minute slots, or simply talk about an area of lexicography that interests them. Because such a variety of backgrounds and national traditions is represented, the ensuing discussion is of great value. Topics this year ranged from electronic bilingualized dictionaries of German/Italian, to the commercial considerations that need to be taken into account by compilers of Canadian school dictionaries. Machine-readable dictionaries of acronyms preoccupied one Polish delegate; Intranet convergence was the speciality of a Danish visitor. MA students on the lexicography course at Exeter spoke about the latest data generated by their research into dictionary user skills, and Japanese experts spoke on Johnson and Webster, on defining vocabulary and on the New Oxford Dictionary of English.
Details about InterLex 15 in 2001 will be available soon on the DRC web site, http://www.exeter.ac.uk/drc.
Rachel Ware
Dictionary Research Centre
University of Exeter
GB
SENSEVAL-2 is the second exercise in evaluating Word Sense Disambiguation programs.
As every lexicographer knows, many words have more than one meaning. This might seem to be a stumbling block to understanding language. The meanings of sentences are built from the meanings of words (to a first approximation) but how do I know which of the word's meanings to build the sentence meaning from? For people, miraculously, this is very rarely an issue. The context makes it evident which meaning applies. But for computers (as for people when they are translating), it is an issue. Words will be misinterpreted and mistranslated unless the correct meaning is chosen.
People have been writing computer programs which address the problem for fifty years. Although some look quite effective, it has, until recently, been very hard to assess how well they compare and how good the state of the art really is. To this end, a first evaluation exercise was set up in 1998. Anyone with a Word Sense Disambiguation program was invited to participate. The exercise proceeded like an exam, with texts containing words to be disambiguated issued, and results returned by a certain date. The results were then scored against the correct answers, and presented and discussed at a workshop. Professional lexicographers were employed to produce the correct answers, and the whole exercise shone a spotlight on the vexed question of sense division, and the relation between dictionary senses and senses in texts. The exercise is chronicled in a Special Issue of the journal, Computers and the Humanities, 34 (1--2), June 2000.
Now we are preparing a second round, so progress since 1998 can be measured and the momentum for establishing the right relations between computer processing and dictionaries is maintained. Last time, there were exercises for English, French and Italian, and 25 participating systems. This time we plan to run exercises for those languages and also Chinese, Danish, Estonian, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Swedish, and to have rather more participating systems.
There is an e-mail discussion list through which the exercise is being organized; to join the list or for other queries about the exercise, please e-mail senseval-coord@sharp.co.uk.
Phil Edmonds
Adam Kilgarriff
SENSEVAL Co-ordinators
http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/events/senseval.
The future of the Dictionary is now being discussed. The most likely development appears to be a seven-year project to re-edit A-B, which were produced in the 1940s and 1950s to a rather more concise plan than the rest of the Dictionary. At the same time it is intended to publish work in progress on the Dictionary's website, together with a Web-based version of the full Dictionary (but without the citations). A Welsh spelling dictionary is also planned. Ultimately a CD-ROM version of the full Dictionary will also be produced.
For details, please see the Dictionary's web site at http://www.aber.ac.uk/~gpcwww.
Andrew Hawke (ach@aber.ac.uk)
Golygydd Cynorthwyol/Rheolwr Systemau: Assistant Editor/Systems Manager
Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: University of Wales Dictionary
Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru: National Library of Wales
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3HH, Wales
Over the years, the Fryske Akademy has received many requests for a Frisian-English dictionary. Basically, there are two groups of people who ask for such a dictionary: firstly, those who take a linguistic interest in Frisian, and secondly, those who are, one might say, `emotionally' interested in Frisian. The latter group consists largely of descendants of Frisian emigrants to English-speaking countries. A third group that might use a Frisian-English dictionary comprises the Frisian users who want to translate from Frisian to English.
From a lexicographic point of view, there is a fundamental difference between this third group and the first two. The non-Frisian users need a `passive' Frisian-English dictionary, i.e., a dictionary that helps them understand Frisian texts, whereas the Frisian users need an `active' dictionary, i.e., a dictionary that helps them produce English texts. As it was obvious that the Fryske Akademy did not have the means to compile two Frisian-English dictionaries, we tried to make the present dictionary as useful as possible for both the Frisian user and the foreign user.
The Frisian-English dictionary has three parts. First there is a concise grammar of Frisian (in English), then the actual dictionary (830 pages) and finally, an English-Frisian word list, which was extracted from the Frisian-English dictionary. Its main purpose is to provide easy access to the Frisian-English part for the non-native speaker of Frisian.
Publishing details:
(2000) Frysk-Ingelsk Wurdboek/Frisian-English Dictionary, with
a corresponding English-Frisian word list. Afûk & Fryske
Akademy, Ljouwert, The Netherlands. ISBN: 90-6273 579 7. Price: DFl
59.50 (27 Euros)
Anne Dykstra (adykstra@fa.knaw.nl)
Fryske Akademy
P.O.Box 54
NL-8900 AB Ljouwert
The Netherlands
Publications include:
Vietnamese Dictionary (Chief Editor, Hoang Phe), the first
Vietnamese dictionary compiled on the basis of a corpus of lexical
cards (nearly 3 million words), and the best-selling Vietnamese
dictionary in Vietnam during these last ten years. There have been
several revised editions with 19 impressions, totalling more than
100,000 copies, and the 7th revised edition was published in 2000:
1220 pages, 14.5 x 20.5 cms.
Vietnamese Orthography (1999) (Hoang Phe). A study of the
orthographic characteristics of the Vietnamese language: a spelling
system based totally on separate syllables. This book puts forward a
set of spelling rules, illustrated by a dictionary of commonly
misspelt syllables (and words) specific to different dialects in the
country. 800 pages, 14.5 x 20.5 cms.
Annan Yiyu (=Translations of Vietnamese Words), a
Chinese-Vietnamese lexicon, compiled by Chinese authors in
c. 15th-16th centuries, introduced and annotated in Vietnamese by
Vuong Loc (1995, reprinted 1997). 200 pages, 15 x 23 cm.
The Vietnamese Language Corpus, in machine-readable form, was started in 1996. More than 60 million syllables have been collected so far (Vietnamese is a syllabic language). Texts in the corpus are taken from publications, including dictionaries, dating from the time when the romanized Vietnamese script, which was formerly hieroglyphic, was first popularized in Vietnam, in the late 19th century.
Hoang Phe (vietlex@fpt.vn)
October
12-13, Paris, France: conference on bilingual dictionaries, organized
by INALCO. Info: Thomas Szende, 14 rue Audubon, 75012 Paris. Tel: +33
01 44 74 06 00.
27-28, Avignon, France: Perspectives cognitives en linguistique appliquée et didactique des langues. E-mail: stephanie.clerc@univ-avignon.fr. Web site: http://u2.u-strasbg.fr/dilanet/cofdela.htm.
November
13-16, Lisbon, Portugal: VII IberoAmerican Symposium of Terminology.
Organizing association: RITerm - Red Iberoamericana de
Terminología (IberoAmerican Terminology Network). Info: Carla
Sacadura Cabral, ILTEC, Rua Conde de Redondo, 74-6, 1150-109 Lisboa,
Portugal. E-mail: csc@iltec.pt.
2001
January
23-26, Santiago de Cuba: Seventh International Symposium on Social
Communication. The symposium will focus on social communication
processes from the points of view of applied linguistics,
computational linguistics, medicine, speech recognition and
processing, mass media, and ethnology and folklore. There will be two
pre-symposium seminars on 22 January, on Spanish as a second language, and on computational linguistics. Info: Dr. Eloina Miyares
Bermudez, Secretaria Ejecutiva Comité Organizador, VII Simposio
Internacional de Comunicacion Social, Centro de Lingüística
Aplicada, Apartado Postal 4067, Vista Alegre, Santiago de Cuba 4, Cuba
90400. Tel: +53 226 42760 or +53 226 41081. Fax: +53 226
41579. E-mail: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu. Web
site: http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/Cuba/index.html.
April
9-11, Rome, Italy: Fourth International Symposium on Phraseology. The
main themes of the Symposium will concern cross-cultural and
typological issues, although all aspects of phraseology are
embraced. Info: ISP4, Dipartimento di Linguistica - Department of
Linguistics, Università di Roma Tre, Via Castro Pretorio, 20,
00185 Roma, Italy. Fax: +39 06 4957333. Tel: +39 06 4959354. E-mail:
ISP4@uniroma3.it. Web site: http://www.uniroma3.it/ling/isp4.
May
6-9, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: the 2001 Meeting of the Dictionary
Society of North America. Web site: http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dsna/