From Writing Dictionaries to Weaving Lexical Networks

Dictionaries are designed as huge texts made up of a collection of much smaller texts, i.e. lexicographic articles. To put it differently, dictionaries are two-dimensional textual models of natural language lexicons. Lexicographers, however, are well aware of the fact that their task is to account for a truly multidimensional entity: a gigantic graph of lexical units connected by various paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. The most significant advance that computer science will bring to the future of lexicography is therefore not the ability to better store, search and manipulate textual lexicographic data; it will be to allow lexicographers to bypass the text as a formal representation of lexicons and to directly work on lexical networks. Such networks are more suitable to the lexicographic endeavour because they are better formal metaphors of the “natural” structure we are trying to account for. This paper presents lexical systems as graph models of lexicons and introduces the corresponding lexicography of virtual dictionaries. It is based on extensive lexicographic work that is being conducted on the French Lexical Network, a lexical database built according to theoretical and methodological principles borrowed from Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology. 1. The proper structure of natural language lexicons: all bets are on the table 1.1 Exploring new lexical structures The idea that dictionaries—huge texts made up of a collection of articles about words—are not the optimum models of natural language lexicons is not new. Lexicographers themselves have experimented with new structures that could better reflect the complex system of lexical relations that is making up our lexical knowledge; for instance, the Language Activator for English (Summers 1993) and the Dictionnaire du Français Usuel for French (Picoche and Rolland 2002). The advent of electronic publishing gave lexicographers an opportunity to improve the structuring and access to lexicographic information (de Schryver 2003, Lew 2012). But the true revolution in the field of lexical modelling came with the Princeton WordNet project (Miller et al. 1990, Fellbaum this volume). There are at least four aspects of this project that, once combined, made it revolutionary. 1. It was based on a theory of how lexical knowledge is structured, this theory imposing strong constraints on how lexical models should be computationally organised as graphs of lexical entities (senses, grouped into hierarchically organised synsets). 2. It was designed as a full-fledged lexicographic project; i.e. the raison d’être of the theory was to lead to actual descriptive models of natural language lexicons. 3. It succeeded in producing an extensive description of contemporary American English that reflects the initial theoretical postulates and is fully implemented as a formal