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This paper presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, the largest survey of dictionary use to date with nearly 10,000 participants in nearly thirty countries. The paper focuses on the comparison of the results of the Slovenian participants with the results of the participants from other European countries. The comparisons are made both with the European averages, and with the results from individual countries, in order to determine in which aspects Slovenian participants share similarities with other dictionary users (and non-users) around Europe, and in which aspects they differ. The findings show that in many ways the Slovenian users are similar to their European counterparts, with some noticeable exceptions, including (much) stronger preference for digital dictionaries over print ones, above-average reliance on other people when dictionary does not contain the relevant information, and the largest difference between the price of a dictionary and the amount willing to spend on it.
Many studies on dictionary use presuppose that users do indeed consult lexicographic resources. However, little is known about what users actually do when they try to solve language problems on their own. We present an observation study where learners of German were allowed to browse the web freely while correcting erroneous German sentences. In this paper, we are focusing on the multi-methodological approach of the study, especially the interplay between quantitative and qualitative approaches. In one example study, we will show how the analysis of verbal protocols, the correction task and the screen recordings can reveal the effects of intuition, language (learning) awareness, and determination on the accuracy of the corrections. In another example study, we will show how preconceived hypotheses about the problem at hand might hinder participants from arriving at the correct solution.
The representation of semantic relations between word senses of different entries in a dictionary is subject to a number of consistency requirements. This paper discusses the issue of maintaining and accessing consistent information on cross-references between sense-related items in electronic dictionaries from a mainly text-technological point of view. We present a number of consistency criteria for cross-referencing related senses and propose a practical approach to handling sense relations in an online dictionary. Our proposal is currently being tested in a large ongoing online dictionary project for German called elexiko. We focus on three different aspects of the dictionary development and editing process where consistency is an important issue: lexicographic data modelling, implementation of a lexicographic database system for an electronic dictionary, and development of practical tools for the lexicographer’s workbench.
Contexts of dictionary use
(2013)
To design effective electronic dictionaries, reliable empirical information on how dictionaries are actually being used is of great value for lexicographers. To my knowledge, no existing empirical research addresses the context of dictionary use, or the extra-lexicographic situations in which a dictionary consultation is embedded. This is mainly due to the fact that data about these contexts is difficult to obtain. To take a first step in closing this research gap, I incorporated an open-ended question (“In which contexts or situations would you use a dictionary?”) into the online survey (N = 684) and asked the participants to answer this question by providing as much information as possible. Instead of presenting well-known facts about standardized types of usage situation, this paper will focus on the more offbeat circumstances of dictionary use and aims of users, as they are reflected in the responses. Overall, the results indicate that there is a community whose work is closely linked with dictionaries and, accordingly, they deal very routinely with this type of text. Dictionaries are also seen as a linguistic treasure trove for games or crossword puzzles, and as a standard which can be referred to as an authority. While it is important to emphasize that the results are only preliminary, they do indicate the potential of empirical research in this area.
In the past two decades, more and more dictionary usage studies have been published, but most of them deal with questions related to what users appreciate about dictionaries, which dictionaries they use and what type of information they need in specific situations — presupposing that users actually consult lexicographic resources. However, language teachers and lecturers in linguistics often have the impression that students do not use enough high-quality dictionaries in their everyday work. With this in mind, we launched an international cooperation project to collect empirical data to evaluate what it is that students actually do while attempting to solve language problems. To this end, we applied a new methodological setting: screen recording in conjunction with a thinking-aloud task. The collected empirical data offers a broad insight into what users really do while they attempt to solve language-related tasks online.
This contribution presents the procedure used in the Handbuch deutscher Kommunikationsverben and in its online version Kommunikationsverben in the lexicographical internet portal OWID to divide sets of semantically similar communication verbs into ever smaller sets of ever closer synonyms. Kommunikationsverben describes the meaning of communication verbs on two levels: a lexical level, represented in the dictionary entries and by sets of lexical features, and a conceptual level, represented by different types of situations referred to by specific types of verbs. The procedure starts at the conceptual level of meaning where verbs used to refer to the same specific situation type are grouped together. At the lexical level of meaning, the sets of verbs obtained from the first step are successively divided into smaller sets on the basis of the criteria of (i) identity of lexical meaning, (ii) identity of lexical features, and (iii) identity of contexts of usage. The stepwise procedure applied is shown to result in the creation of a semantic network for communication verbs.
Dictionary portals
(2013)
We start by trying to answer a question that has already been asked by de Schryver et al. (2006): Do dictionary users (frequently) look up words that are frequent in a corpus. Contrary to their results, our results that are based on the analysis of log files from two different online dictionaries indicate that users indeed look up frequent words frequently. When combining frequency information from the Mannheim German Reference Corpus and information about the number of visits in the Digital Dictionary of the German Language as well as the German language edition of Wiktionary, a clear connection between corpus and look-up frequencies can be observed. In a follow-up study, we show that another important factor for the look-up frequency of a word is its temporal social relevance. To make this effect visible, we propose a de-trending method where we control both frequency effects and overall look-up trends.