The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.
IntroductionResearch into dictionary use has become increasingly important in recent years. In contrast to 15 years ago, new findings in this area are presented every year, e.g. at every Euralex or eLex conference. These studies range from questionnaire or log file studies to smaller-scale studies focussing on eye tracking, usability, or other aspects of dictionary use measurable in a lab. For an overview of different studies,
New language technologies are coming, thanks to the huge and competing private investment fuelling rapid progress; we can either understand and foresee their effects, or be taken by surprise and spend our time trying to catch up. This report scketches out some transformative new technologies that are likely to fundamentally change our use of language. Some of these may feel unrealistically futuristic or far-fetched, but a central purpose of this report - and the wider LITHME network - is to illustrate that these are mostly just the logical development and maturation of technologies currently in prototype. But will everyone benefit from all these shiny new gadgets? Throughout this report we emphasise a range of groups who will be disadvantaged and issues of inequality. Important issues of security and privacy will accompany new language technologies. A further caution is to re-emphasise the current limitations of AI. Looking ahead, we see many intriguing opportunities and new capabilities, but a range of other uncertainties and inequalities. New devices will enable new ways to talk, to translate, to remember, and to learn. But advances in technology will reproduce existing inequalities among those who cannot afford these devices, among the world’s smaller languages, and especially for sign language. Debates over privacy and security will flare and crackle with every new immersive gadget. We will move together into this curious new world with a mix of excitement and apprehension - reacting, debating, sharing and disagreeing as we always do. Plug in, as the human-machine era dawns.
We present a portfolio of natural legal language processing and document curation services currently under development in a collaborative European project. First, we give an overview of the project and the different use cases, while, in the main part of the article, we focus upon the 13 different processing services that are being deployed in different prototype applications using a flexible and scalable microservices architecture. Their orchestration is operationalised using a content and document curation workflow manager.
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