Introduction to Week 6

Welcome to the sixth and final week of this course. We hope you have enjoyed the activities so far, and that you feel you now know more about the world of dictionaries.

This week we will share our views on current trends in lexicographic research and practice, and we are keen to hear your thoughts about what the dictionaries of the future will look like.

In some respects, dictionaries may look like a thing of the past, so we want to discuss with you whether this is an unavoidable fact, or whether dictionaries can change to adapt to and make use of the latest technological advances.

We will look into the cutting-edge technologies that can be developed and used to make the work of lexicographers easier and let them concentrate on tasks that only humans can perform. You will learn about different computational resources like WordNet and BabelNet, and how they can be seen as one possible way dictionaries can develop.

You will also learn about what researchers are doing to try and automate the very difficult tasks of finding new words (or neologisms) and new meanings of words to be added to dictionaries as they emerge in the language, as well as the tasks of writing definitions and finding suitable examples of dictionary entries from corpora.

We will hear from Jane Solomon about the type of content that dictionaries might include in the future, in addition to what we would traditionally expect to find.

Finally, we will wrap up the course asking you to answer the questions we asked you in the poll at the beginning of the first week. This is to see whether your opinions have changed as a result of taking this course.