This paper introduces a computational method for testing dictionaries. It discusses the implementation of this method on testing five current dictionaries of Swahili and provides a number of test results. The tested dictionaries are Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu (TUKI), Kamusi ya Maana na Matumizi (OUP), Modern Swahili Modern English Dictionary (MStryck), Kamusi ya Kiswahili Kiingereza (TUKI), and...

The growing avaibility of dictionaries in electronic form calls for a model sophisticated enough to represent the richness of entries and enable complex information retrieval. Electronic dictionaries are a special kind of object, intermediary between a text and a database. Textual models are not powerful enough to handle complex information retrieval, and conventional database models are not fl...

This paper addresses a problem in the current encoding bilingual dictionary models, and argues for the necessity of having a lexicogrammatical perspective in such dictionaries, by discussing a pair of equivalents in English and in Japanese. Because existing encoding dictionaries base their models on decoding dictionaries, they force users to start from a fixed lexical item. This paper demonstra...

Recently the LATL has undertaken the development of a multilingual translation system based on a symbolic parsing technology and on a transfer-based translation model. A crucial component of the system is the lexical database, notably the bilingual dictionaries containing the information for the lexical transfer from one language to another. As the number of necessary bilingual dictionaries is ...

Sparse coding with dictionary learning (DL) has shown excellent classification performance. Despite the considerable number of existing works, how to obtain features on top of which dictionaries can be better learned remains an open and interesting question. Many current prevailing DL methods directly adopt well-performing crafted features. While such strategy may empirically work well, it igno...

User studies have shown repeatedly that the type of information that dictionary users want from dictionaries the most is meaning. This is not surprising: in fact the dictionary has always been perceived as a repository of meanings of words. While this popular view has not changed much, the advent of electronic dictionaries can change the lexicographers’ approach to the indication of meaning. Th...

The deployment of speech technology systems in the developing world is often hampered by the lack of appropriate linguistic resources. A suitable pronunciation dictionary is one such resource that can be difficult to obtain for lesser-resourced languages. We design a process for the development of pronunciation dictionaries in resource-scarce environments, and apply this to the development of p...

This paper is a project report of the lexicographic Internet portal OWID, an Online Vocabulary Information System of German which is being built at the Institute of German Language in Mannheim (IDS). Overall, the contents of the portal and its technical approaches will be presented. The lexical database is structured in a granular way which allows to extend possible search options for lexicogra...

This paper1 reports the effects of three different electronic interfaces on EFL learners’ look-up behaviour. Subjects performed language tasks under three conditions: with a paper dictionary, a traditional electronic dictionary, and two non-traditional electronic dictionaries. Statistically significant differences in use were recorded. 1 Background Electronic dictionaries2 have been increasingl...

We describe on-going work towards publishing language resources included in dialectal dictionaries in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, and so to support wider access to the diverse cultural data associated with such dictionary entries, like the various historical and geographical variations of the use of such words. Beyond this, our approach allows the cross-linking of entries of dialectal dic...