Text corpora have played a key role in the creation of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries for several decades at least. Recent advances in NLP have given lexicographers powerful new tools for exploring corpora, distinguishing word senses, and crafting dictionary entries.
I’ll discuss some of the tools and corpus resources that are being used to create the first historical dictionary of the Irish language at the Royal Irish Academy.
Kevin Scannell,
Cadhan Aonair
Kevin Scannell is a software developer specializing in computational resources that help speakers of indigenous and minority languages use their language online, with a particular focus on tools that support the Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic communities. He has developed an Irish spell checker, grammar checker, and thesaurus, as well as a number of dictionaries and translation engines for the Gaelic languages. He is also a member of the team that has produced Irish localisations of some important software products including Gmail, Twitter, Firefox, and WhatsApp.