Creating a Multilingual Data Collection for Bilingual Lexicography from Parallel Monolingual Lexicons

In the DELIS project 1 , a set of parallel monolingual lexicon fragments have been designed. They are parallel in two ways: (1) they cover the same fragment (the most general verbs of sensory perception and of speech act), and (2) they are based on the same theoretical approaches and on comparable classiications and descriptive devices. It is claimed in this paper that such parallel fragments, formalized and represented in a modular and access-neutral way, constitute a lexical data collection which can serve as a pre-dictionary fact base from where bilingual dictionaries can be derived. We discuss examples of the procedures by which raw material for bilingual dictionaries can be derived from the fact base (semi-)automatically. 1. Metalexicographic introduction: monolingual and bilingual dictionaries { the role of a pre-dictionary fact base In metalexicography, there has been some discussion about directional as opposed to non-directional bilingual dictionaries. Directional dictionaries { as advocated and illustrated by Kromann 1989] and Kromann/Riiber/Rosbach 1989] { aim at eeciency of presentation, taking the users' perspective and the users' mother tongue as a starting point. For an \active" translation dictionary of the directional type (from mother tongue to the users' \foreign" language), the main objective is to make those cases clear where the target language diiers considerably from the source language. If the target language lexical items display the same properties as the source language items, the lexicographer can leave their description (partly) underspeciied, to save space in the article; it is not felt necessary, for example, to describe reading distinctions which are parallel in both languages. The non-directional dictionary 2 aims at explicitness more than at economy of space: ideally, the relevant distinctions of the source language are made explicit in any case: even if they happen to exist in a parallel fashion in the target language 3. The non-directional approach seems to more readily support the \reuse" of lexical descriptions: the experiments carried out on the Van Dale dictionaries by Al 1988], Heid 1990] and Martin/van der Vliet 1992] demonstrated that non-directional lexical descriptions can quite easily be reused 4. The diierence between directional and non-directional dictionaries can thus be paraphrased (if we allow ourselves some simpliication) as a trade-oo between eeciency and explicitness. It thus has 1 DELIS stands for \Descriptive Lexical Speciications and tools for corpus-based lexicon building". DELIS (Febru-ary 1993 through December 1995) is a shared-cost project partly funded by the DG …