Humans and corpora

You learned about the role of corpora in dictionary-making in previous weeks, and in Step 4.7 you saw the effect of corpus choice on the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

In Week 6 we will discuss the role of corpus-based tools in the automatic identification of new words. However, in previous weeks you also learned about the use of human informants in dictionary development. In addition to corpus evidence, some major publishers still use the findings from teams of human readers to discover new words and meanings which are worthy of inclusion in their dictionaries.

The role of human readers at Merriam-Webster is explained on the Merriam-Webster ‘Help’ page:

“Each day most Merriam-Webster editors devote an hour or two to reading a cross section of published material, including books, newspapers, magazines, and electronic publications … The editors scour the texts in search of new words, new usages of existing words, variant spellings, and inflected forms – in short, anything that might help in deciding if a word belongs in the dictionary, understanding what it means, and determining typical usage.”

“The OED requires several independent examples of the word being used, and also evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable amount of time. The exact time-span and number of examples may vary: for instance, one word may be included on the evidence of only a few examples, spread out over a long period of time, while another may gather momentum very quickly, resulting in a wide range of evidence in a shorter space of time.”

Your task

What kind of information about new words do you think a corpus can provide, but a team of human readers cannot provide?

What kind of information about new words do you think a team of human readers can provide, but a corpus cannot provide?

Further reading

Select the following link for more additional information about the way Oxford Dictionaries are created.