Report on EURALEX LUA 2001 : Birte Lönneker, Hamburg University
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, 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:
  1. 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);
  2. the scripts for reading the vocabulary into the database were improved, enabling the automatic addition of some grammar information;
  3. 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]);
  4. 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;
  5. 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, the new Web site (http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/slowenisch) will be launched within the next few weeks. The site contains bilingual, and for some topics trilingual 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 101,000 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.

[1] B. Lönneker and P. Jakopin. 2003. "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.

Birte Lönneker (author of the Slovenian-German-Slovenian online dictionary)
on 31st July 2003