Modeling Frequency Data: Methodological Considerations on the Relationship between Dictionaries and Corpora

Abstract

Academic dictionary writing is making greater and greater use of the TEI Guidelines’ dictionary module. And as increasing numbers of TEI dictionaries become available, there is an ever more palpable need to work towards greater interoperability among dictionary writing systems and other language resources that are needed by dictionaries and dictionary tools. In particular this holds true for the crucial role that statistical data obtained from language resources play in lexicographic workflow—a role that also has to be reflected in the model of the data produced in these workflows. Presenting a range of current projects, the authors address two main questions in this area: How can the relationship between a dictionary and other language resources be conceptualized, irrespective of whether they are used in the production of the dictionary or to enrich existing lexicographic data? And how can this be documented using the TEI Guidelines? Discussing a variety of options, this paper proposes a customization of the TEI dictionary module that tries to respond to the emerging requirements in an environment of increasingly intertwined language resources.

Keywords

• lexicography
• language resources
• digital corpora
• statistics