Data Structures in Lexicography: from Trees to Graphs

In lexicography, a dictionary entry is typically encoded in XML as a tree: a hierarchical data structure of parent-child relations where every element has at most one parent. This choice of data structure makes some aspects of the lexicographer’s work unnecessarily difficult, from deciding where to place multi-word items to reversing an entire bilingual dictionary. This paper proposes that these and other notorious areas of difficulty can be made easier by remodelling dictionaries as graphs rather than trees. However, unlike other authors who have proposed a radical departure from tree structures and whose proposals have remained largely unimplemented, this paper proposes a conservative compromise in which existing tree structures become augmented with specific types of inter-entry relations designed to solve specific problems.