A General Lexicographic Model for a Typological Variety of Dictionaries in African Languages

Abstract

So far, there have been few descriptions on creating structures capable of storing lexicographic data, ISO 24613:2008 being one of the latest. Another one is by Spohr (2012), who designs a multifunctional lexical resource which is able to store data of different types of dictionaries in a user-oriented way. Technically, his design is based on the principle of a hierarchical XML/OWL (eXtensible Markup Language/Web Ontology Language) representation model. This article follows another route in describing a model based on entities and relations between them; MySQL (usually referred to as: Structured Query Language) describes a database system of tables containing data and definitions of relations between them. The model was developed in the context of the project "Scientific eLexicography for Africa" and the lexicographic database to be built thereof will be implemented with MySQL. The principles of the ISO model and of Spohr's model are adhered to with one major difference in the implementation strategy: we do not place the lemma in the centre of attention, but the sense description -all other elements, including the lemma, depend on the sense description. This article also describes the contained lexicographic data sets and how they have been collected from different sources. As our aim is to compile several prototypical internet dictionaries (a monolingual Northern Sotho dictionary, a bilingual learners' Xhosa-English dictionary and a bilingual Zulu-English dictionary), we describe the necessary microstructural elements for each of them and which principles we adhere to when designing different ways of accessing them. We plan to make the model and the (empty) database with all graphical user interfaces that have been developed, freely available by mid-2015.

Voorlopige kriteria vir wie en wat die leksikograaf is

“…Teoretiese modelle vir navorsing oor of met woordeboeke, of vir die samestelling van bepaalde leksikografiese produkte, berus gereeld op dié twee teorieë en hierdie teorieë word ook tipies aangepas om 'n verskeidenheid leksikografiese probleme te probeer oplos (vgl. Faaß et al 2014, Gouws 2014a, 2014b, 2018a, en Gouws en Prinsloo 2021a, 2021b. Vanweë hierdie wesenlike rol wat teorie, navorsing en kritiese beoordeling en beskouing in die leksikografie speel, kan daar geargumenteer word dat allerlei teoretici, kritici en navorsers ook leksikograwe kan wees.…”

Collaborative construction of lexicographic and parallel datasets for African languages: first assessment

“…Indeed, we wish to develop an internal structuring of the articles of our dictionaries around the meaning, via graphs connected to each other. To do this, like (Faaß et al, 2014), we opted for the highlighting of the meaning at the entry of the articles of the dictionaries.…”

Conversion of the English-Xhosa Dictionary for Nurses to a Linguistic Linked Data Framework

“…LMF, designed between 2003 and 2008, is ISO standard 24613:2008 and it provides a standardised framework for natural language processing (NLP) and machine-readable dictionaries [31]. While it is able to represent linguistic information, it cannot represent lexicons to ontologies [32], [33] (p. 3), and although it describes itself as interoperable, LMF has been criticised for its inability to establish interoperability between different lexicons, as well as its vagueness for use when applied to different [34] (p. 96). Despite this, lemon (and thus Ontolex-Lemon) drew heavy inspiration from LMF, with LMF's core ontology adopted by lemon, as well as classes and entities imported from LMF, however, in order to describe the ontology-lexicon interface, additional vocabulary was added [28].…”