Lecture and seminar topics include:

  • Corpora
    • Design
    • Development
    • Annotation
    • The web as a corpus
  • Frame Semantics and a theory-based lexicography
  • Lexicography
    • dictionary microstructure and macrostructure
    • lexicographic relevance: how to know which facts to extract from a corpus
    • theoretical and practical issues in establishing a word's meanings
    • approaches to defining
  • Computational linguistics
    • automatic lexical acquisition
    • word sense disambiguation
  • The dictionary project
    • setting up and managing the project
    • dictionary-writing software


Practical activities include:

  • compiling dictionary entries and detailed database entries (monolingual and bilingual)
  • using corpus data to identify meanings
  • using regular expressions
  • applying a Frame Semantics approach to lexicography
  • critiquing dictionary entries
  • building 'Word Sketches' (automated profiles showing a word's key grammatical and collocational features)


For all our workshops, participants are provided with a book of Course Notes, typically of about 250 pages. The Course Notes replicate lecture sessions, outline practical tasks, and include an up-to-date bibliography and list of relevant websites.