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Good dictionaries are hand-compiled by experienced lexicographers. Not Google's strength, to put it mildly. What Google would be extremely good at is creating
by mdemare 17y ago
Good dictionaries are hand-compiled by experienced lexicographers. Not Google's strength, to put it mildly.
What Google would be extremely good at is creating corpora for all these languages. An example of an excellent Spanish corpus is the following: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp
- ntoshev 17y agoGood encyclopedias are compiled by experienced... oh wait. No idea if this specific effort is any good, but Google have done a lot of interesting things with language already.
- jacobolus 17y agoGood encyclopedias are written by large numbers of individual contributors with expertise in specialized fields, who barely get paid for their efforts, most of the money from encyclopedias going to pay for the organization, compilation, editing, etc. It turns out that the latter can now be much more effectively decentralized than ever before, and contributors no longer need to be explicitly recruited. (which is certainly not to say that Wikipedia isn’t dramatically different from other encyclopedias) Dictionaries are still compiled by experienced lexicographers. * * * Incidentally, does anyone know of a good online thesaurus, now that thesaurus.com is no longer using decent source material (after being hit with a lawsuit for essentially stealing it). All the ones online seem to use Roget’s II, which is vastly inferior to the original Roget’s.
- derefr 17y agoIt depends on how we're [re]defining "dictionary." A dictionary has the potential to be a set of pairs of words, and any of the following: 1. how the word is used, 2. what the consensus is on how the word is used, 3. what the consensus is on how we 'should' use the word, 4. what the consensus of people who are, by consensus, considered "experienced lexicographers", is, on how the word is used, 5. and what the consensus of people who are, by consensus, considered "experienced lexicographers," is, on how the word 'should' be used. Google is trying the first approach, defining words by trying to learn them itself, like a person who naturally "absorbs" a word by hearing it used in the right context enough. The second is how people usually learn words, by asking others what they mean when they hear them. The third is prescriptivism, but ruled by the majority: words such as "ur" 'should' be valid, and so on, in the majority's opinion. The forth is what dictionaries try to contain, and the fifth is what books of "advice" like Strunk and White contain. All are different, though some overlap (as, e.g., 3 may be influenced by 5.)
- mdemare 17y agoI don't see how Google does that. I see Google collecting online all the online dictionaries they can find, and uniting them under a single interface, but I haven't found any dictionaries where they have contributed content. I think they should do that, though.
- derefr 17y agoYou mean like Wiktionary?
- alecco 17y agoA gringo collecting words for an "Espanol" dictionary. Hilarious.
- mdemare 17y agoA lexicographer should be a native speaker. For a corpus-compiler, there's no reason for such a requirement.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ananthrk 17y agoI have heard about Google using lot of local language expertise for things like validating the ranks for local language search results. So, this might also have been vetted by such a group.