The arrival of the modern computer set in motion a series of lexicographers' dreams without equal in the history of dictionary making. Achieving the wildest of those electronic-dictionary vistas has the potential to result in reference works beyond all recognition. This potential, alas, remains to be realised. The aim of this article is to analyse the major achievements and future prospects when it comes to 'human-oriented electronic dictionaries' (for short EDs). In the first two sections the scene is set by revisiting this article's title. In the third section various ED typologies are presented, including a new three-step access dictionary typology. The latter is used as a frame in section four, where forty pros and cons of paper versus electronic products are reviewed. This study clearly shows that ED dreams are indeed not without a solid basis. The next two sections then deal with the ED dreams proper, first in the form of a brief diachronic perspective singling out main dreams and main actors (section five), then in a much more detailed fashion sorting and scrutinising one hundred and twenty dreams found throughout the literature (section six). Section seven concludes with some observations on the way ahead. 1. Lexicographers' Dreams 'I would not be surprised if for most general uses dictionaries in book-form will be antiquated before the end of the century.' (Meijs 1990: 69-70) Just like the adepts in any other field of scholarly activity, lexicographers have dreamt throughout the ages. Such dreams were and are, more often than not, sparked by technological revolutions. The invention of the transistor, and its subsequent use in what came to be known as the modern computer, eventually led to most lexicographers' dreams since the late-1960s. The use of the computer in linguistics, as compared to for example the natural sciences and engineering, was however a gradual process (Knowles 1990: 1646). When it comes to computer use in lexicography, Cerquiglini (cited in Pruvost 2000: 188) distinguishes three phases: (1) computer-assisted (paper) lexicography, (2) transfer of existing

Abstract. The orthography of many resource-scarce languages includes diacritically marked characters. Falling outside the scope of the standard Latin encoding, these characters are often represented in digital language resources as their unmarked equivalents. This renders corpus compilation more difficult, as these languages typically do not have the benefit of large electronic dictionaries to perform diacritic restoration. This paper describes experiments with a machine learning approach that is able to automatically restore diacritics on the basis of local graphemic context. We apply the method to the African languages of Cilubà, Gĩkũyũ, Kĩkamba, Maa, Sesotho sa Leboa, Tshivenda and Yoruba and contrast it with experiments on Czech, Dutch, French, German and Romanian, as well as Vietnamese and Chinese Pinyin.

This contribution examines the digital revolution in lexicography from the perspective of the dictionary user. We begin with an observation that in the information age the status of the dictionary is changing, and so are patterns of user behaviour, with general internet search engines encroaching on the grounds traditionally reserved for lexicographic queries. Clearly, we need to know more about user behaviour in the digital environment, and for this we need to harness user research, to find out how the increasingly flexible and adaptive lexical reference tools of the future need to behave to best accommodate user needs. We summarize the existing findings and show in what ways digital dictionaries are already able to serve users better than their paper predecessors. The challenge to produce efficient and effective dictionaries is best seen in the context of dictionary users' reference skills, which now tend to overlap with digital literacy. We conclude with a possible vision of the future.