EURALEX newsletter: Winter 2003

EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY

EURALEX NEWSLETTER

Winter 2003

to be published at IJL: Spring 2004

Editor: Paul Bogaards. Email for correspondence and contributions: P.Bogaards@let.leidenuniv.nl

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 Paul Bogaards at the above address, or by email. The deadlines for winter (December), spring (March), summer (June), and autumn (September) issues are respectively 1 August, 25 October, 1 February, and 1 May annually.

The EURALEX Web Site

The URL of the EURALEX web site is http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex.


CONTENTS

IJL is an ISI referenced Journal now
EURALEX 2004
Use of the EURALEX logo and name
The Slovenian-German-Slovenian Online Dictionary
- current status
Report from the 7th Nordic Conference of Lexicography 2003
Forthcoming events

IJL is an ISI referenced Journal now

We are proud to announce that the International Journal of Lexicography will from now on be included in the ISI Database. This database includes about 8,600 international journals, selected from a much longer list: only 10-12% of the journals evaluated is selected. In the selection procedure several factors are of special importance, such as timeliness of publication, the application of a blind peer review procedure, international editorial conventions, citation data, as well as the place the journal occupies in the field.

Thanks to the many contributors who have sent their papers to IJL and to the referees who accepted to review them, but most of all thanks to the remarkable achievement of the former editor of IJL, Tony Cowie, the importance of this journal for the field of lexicography and lexicology has now been duly acknowledged.

Those who want to know more about ISI can visit www.isinet.com

Paul Bogaards
Editor IJL

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EURALEX 2004

Registration is now open for the 11th EURALEX International Congress which is to be held in Lorient, France, from the 6th to 10th July 2004. Invited speakers will include Tony Cowie, Christine Jacquet-Pfau and John Sinclair. Up-to-date information on registration, the programme, social events, and accommodation is to be found at the Congress Website: http://www.univ-ubs.fr/euralex2004.

Registration and accommodation have been separated. Registration forms and fees must be sent to the university at the address given. Online payment is not possible, but credit card details can be faxed or mailed. Accommodation, other than the Youth Hostels, is to be booked directly through the Tourist Office of Lorient. Given the popularity of the Breton coast in summer it is preferable to book early even if we do have block bookings. The youth hostel of Lorient can be found at: http://www.fuaj.org/aj/lorient/

Those who wish to stay longer, or book family accommodation should consult the website of the Gîtes de France - http://www.gites-de-france.fr/. Booking must be done directly in this case.

We are currently negotiating preferential rail and air tariffs, details will be found on the website and will be sent to all those who have pre-registered or registered. Lorient is easy of access by road, rail and by plane. Flights usually require a change of planes in Paris or Lyon. More information can be found on the website.

We look forward to welcoming you to Lorient. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at elx2004@univ-ubs.fr.

Geoffrey Williams

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Use of the EURALEX Logo and Name: Endorsement of External Events

EURALEX has in the past been asked to endorse activities in the field of lexicography, including workshops, training courses, etc. The request for endorsement has to be made in writing to the President or to the Secretary.

At the EURALEX General Meeting in August 2002, the membership suggested that the Board should come up with a set of guidelines and criteria for determining whether events qualified for EURALEX endorsement. After discussion at a Board meeting, it was decided that

non-commercial events could be endorsed according to the procedures in place so far.
for commercial events, EURALEX will put out a notice on its mailing list and/or in its newsletter, but will not formally endorse them.

The EURALEX Board

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The Slovenian-German-Slovenian online dictionary for learners: Current status

The Slovenian-German-Slovenian online dictionary for learners was awarded the Laurence Urdang EURALEX Award in 2001. Since the time of application, the dictionary has grown considerably. The aim of covering the vocabulary contained in a Slovenian textbook for beginners (Metka Cuk et al., 1996: Odkrivajmo slovenscino) was achieved by November 2002. During the winter 2002/2003, Birte Lönneker, the author of the dictionary was working as a DAAD fellow in the Corpus Laboratory (head: Primoz Jakopin) of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Research Center (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana/Slovenia. During this three-months-stay, she accomplished the following tasks concerning the dictionary:

an advanced student of Slovenian and German with Slovenian mother tongue, Katarina Rozman, was hired to proofread the contents of the dictionary and to add grammar information according to a tagset for the Slovenian language (developed by the author and compliant with the ZRC SAZU tagset);
the scripts for reading the vocabulary into the database were improved, enabling the automatic addition of some grammar information;
the vocabulary was evaluated against a lemmatized list of the most frequent words in a newspaper corpus, as well as against the most popular user queries (cf. Lönneker/Jakopin 2003 [1]);
as a result of the evaluation mentioned above, the 500 most frequent lemmas of the newspaper corpus that were missing from the dictionary were prepared for its enlargement;
the dictionary was presented at a meeting of the lexicological department of ZRC SAZU in February 2003.

At the time of this writing, the online database of the dictionary - corresponding to the textbook vocabulary - consists of more than 4,800 entries. About one third of them have been proofread and completed by Katarina Rozman, whose work is funded by the EURALEX Laurence Urdang Award. We can expect the entire textbook vocabulary to be proofread by the end of this summer.

The author of the dictionary applied for a new Web account at the University of Hamburg, where the dictionary application can continue running without charge still for some time after the end of her PhD studies. The perl scripts have already been moved to their new location, while the new Web site (http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/slowenisch) is still under construction. The author is planning to create a bilingual site with information on the vocabulary sources (the textbook and the newspaper corpus), the content and technical background of the dictionary - including grammar information -, as well as links to related online resources.

The Slovenian-German-Slovenian online dictionary is a popular source of lexical knowledge on the Web: Since November 2002, around 70,000 user requests have been issued to its interface, which corresponds to a monthly rate of around 10,000 requests. Subject to the availability of financial and personal resources, the author would like to continue the enlargement of the dictionary and the research related to this task.

Birte Lönneker (author of the Slovenian-German-Slovenian online dictionary)
17th June 2003

[1] B. Lönneker and P. Jakopin. "Contents and evaluation of the first German-Slovenian online dictionary."
In EACL 2003 (10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) Conference Companion. ACL, 2003, pp. 119-122.

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Report from the 7th Nordic Conference of Lexicography 2003

The biennial Nordic Conference of Lexicography was held in Volda and Ørsta, Norway, for the 7th time since the Nordic Association of Lexicography was founded in Oslo in 1991. The conference had participants from all the Nordic countries, including the Faroe Islands and Greenland, 108 participants in all. The opening lecture was held by senior researcher Bolette S. Pedersen from Center for Sprogteknologi in Copenhagen. Her topic was «Computational lexicography in the Nordic Countries - status and visions». She gave a good overview of the achievements in the field, and what is still to be done. She pointed out the SPINN-network, whose goal is S2004harmonizing the computational databases for the different Nordic lexicons. The systematic description of the vocabulary of a language is closely related to its grammar, and such lexicons can even give grammatical descriptions a better empirical fundament. Thus there is a synergy between computational and traditional lexicography and grammar writing. Two key components in this connection are systematicity and the formulation of rules.

All in all there were 35 papers given during the four days, spread over a number of lexicographical topics categorized under monolingual lexicography, bilingual lexicography, LSP-lexicography, general theory and methodology and computational lexicography. In addition most of the on-going dictionary projects were presented and discussed.

Since the conference site was in Volda and Ørsta, naturally Ivar Aasen and his brilliant lexicographical feat in documenting the living remnants of the old Norse language in the Norwegian dialects after several hundred years of Danish as administrative language, was focused on, both by the hosts Ottar Grepstad from Aasen-tunet and Stephen Walton from Volda University College, and also in several papers by the staff of Norsk Ordbok, the follow up of Aasen’s own dictionary from 1873.

The conference venue is situated in the middle of the most beautiful scenery of mountains and fjords in Norway, and the participants did not miss the opportunity to experience it by foot and boat. Everywhere we were wished very welcome by the majors and the inhabitants at large, as well as by the many interesting birds at the Island Runde.

The conference was concluded by a general meeting in the association, where a new leader was elected, Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld from Norway. In 2005 the 8th Nordic conference in lexicography will be held in Denmark. The association has had great influence on the cooperation between Nordic lexicographers during the last ten years.

Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld
Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitenskap/
Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature
Universitetet i Oslo

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Forthcoming events

2004

June
21-24, Gargnano del Garda, Italy: Second International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology. Info: Prof. Giovanni Iamartino, University of Milan, piazza S.Alessandro 1, 20123 Milano, Italy. Tel: +39 02 503 13570. Fax: +39 02 503 13563. E-mail: giovanni.iamartino@unimi.it

July
6-10,Lorient, France: Eleventh EURALEX Congress. Info: Congress Organizers EURALEX 2004, Dr. Geoffrey Williams, Université de Bretagne Sud, Faculté de Lettres et de Sciences Humaines, 4 rue Jean Zay, B.P. 92116, 56321 Lorient cedex, France.
Email: elx2004@univ-ubs.fr.
Web site: http://www.univ-ubs.fr/euralex2004

August
26-29, Basel, Switzerland: EUROPHRAS Conference.
Web site: http://www.europhras.unizh.ch/

2005

May
18-21, Maastricht, The Netherlands: Maastricht Session of the 4^th International Maastricht-Lódz
Duo Colloquium on «Translation and Meaning».
Information:
Drs Marcel Thelen, Department of Translation and Interpreting,
Maastricht School of International Communication
Hogeschool Zuyd, P.O. Box 634, 6200 AP Maastricht
The Netherlands.
E-mail: m.m.g.j.thelen@hszuyd.nl>
Tel.: + 31 43 346 6471
Fax: + 31 43 346 6649.
Web site: http://www.hszuyd.msti.translation-and-meaning.nedweb.com

September
23-25, Lódz, Poland: Lódz Session of the 4^th International Maastricht-Lódz Duo Colloquium on
«Translation and Meaning».
Information:
Prof. Dr habil. Barbara-Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
Department of English Language, University of Lódz, Al.
Kosciuszki 65, 90-514 Lódz, Poland.
E-mail:duoduo@krysia.uni.lodz.pl
Tel.: + 48 42 636 6337
Fax: + 48 42 636 6337/ ..6872.
Web site: http://www.hszuyd.msti.translation-and-meaning.nedweb.com

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