Lexicom at 25: Reflections on the Changing World of Lexicography and Language Technology
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Paper in proceedings |
| Conference | 9th Biennial Conference on Electronic Lexicography in the 21st Century, eLex 2025 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | Electronic lexicography in the 21st century (eLex 2025): Intelligent lexicography. Proceedings of the eLex 2025 conference |
| Keywords | dictionary; lexicography; Lexicom workshop; Postediting lexicography; Large Language Models; teaching lexicography; NLP; Sketch Engine |
| Attached files | |
| Description | In this paper we show how the academic content and computational tools featured in Lexicom form a parallel history of the last 25 years of innovation in lexicography. Lexicom is a 5-day intensive workshop offering hands-on training in corpus-based dictionary creation, from collecting and annotating language data to publishing the final product. Since it was launched in 2001, by Sue Atkins, Adam Kilgarriff, and Michael Rundell, Lexicom has adapted (sometimes incrementally, sometimes substantially), to reflect ongoing developments in linguistic theory, corpus tools, and NLP. Lexicom’s curriculum integrates theoretical grounding with practical tasks such as corpus analysis, regular expressions, word sense disambiguation, and definition-writing. It provides an introduction to all of the key components of dictionary-creation and to the current state of the art in our field. The lexicographic landscape has seen transformative changes during Lexicom’s 25-year lifetime. In 2001, corpora were relatively small even for well-resourced languages and non-existent for others; querying tools were quite basic; and the end-product was almost invariably a printed book. We now use billion-word corpora and sophisticated software to produce mainly digital dictionaries. Lexicom has mirrored these shifts, most recently incorporating AI and large language models. Amid all these dramatic changes, some constants in the dictionary-making process remain, and Lexicom continues to serve as both a reflection of and a guide through this ongoing evolution. |