Nuria Gala and Michael Zock (eds). Ressources Lexicales: Contenue, construction, utilisation, evaluation.
G. Williams · International Journal of Lexicography · 2014
‘Dictionary’ is a highly evocative word conjuring up images of weighty tomes that hold an accumulation of concisely worded lexical knowledge. ‘Lexical resources' is much less romantic as a term, but an apt one for the repositories of lexical information required in natural language processing and which cover a broad variety of formats for the storage and manipulation of words. Thus, in its very title, this book declares its main audience: the computational user rather than the lover of dictionaries. The choice of wording is judicious in that the content discussed goes well beyond dictionaries and into thesauri, Wordnet and other lexical tools currently being built and used in information technology. ‘Built’ and ‘used’ hides the other main issue as some of these analyses highlight, and that is ‘reuse’; seeing how existing tools can be adapted to computational usage, or act as an inspiration for future digital resources. This volume, co-edited by Núria Gala and Michael Zock, is published as part of the Linguisticæ Investigationes Supplementa series and brings together a series of articles in French from a number of leading French, or Francophone, NLP (Natural Language Processing) researchers. After a brief introductory section, there are 10 chapters in all, each dealing with a different aspect of lexical resources. The introduction informs us that the volume is divided into two sections, with the first (consisting of three chapters) being seen as more historical, and the second more computational. An important factor is that all the tools described are open-source and open-access, which shows that the need to give access to these resources is a prime element in the compilers’ choice of articles. The target is primarily NLP, but as the worlds of computing and lexicography are increasingly interwoven, and also that the prime lexical resources discussed here are indeed dictionaries, the volume will obviously be of interest to both communities.