LEXICOGRAPHY IN GLOBAL CONTEXTS 25 Lexicography between NLP and Linguistics: Aspects of Theory and Practice Lars Trap-Jensen Society for Danish Language and Literature E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract Over the last hundred years, lexicography has witnessed three major revolutions: a descriptive revolution at the turn of the 20th century, a corpus revolution in the second half of the 20th century, and the digital revolution which is happening right now. Finding ourselves in the middle of a radical change, most of us have difficulties orient- ing ourselves and knowing where all this is leading. I don’t pretend to know the answers but one thing is clear: we cannot ignore it and carry on as normal. In this article, I will discuss how lexicography and natural language processing can mutually benefit from each other and how lexicography could meet some of the needs that NLP has. I suggest that lexicographers shift their focus from a single dictionary towards the lexical database behind it. Keywords: e-lexicography, NLP, interoperability, data structure 1 Introduction Let me start with a confession: In my career, I have never been much concerned with natural language processing from a theoretical point of view. The reason is simple: My main interest lies with how natural language works, and I find that formal models of language have so far been unable to come up with con- vincing explanations of the way language works. This applies both to formal linguistic theories such as generative grammar in the Chomskyan tradition and to computational linguistic models such as the ones used in NLP.