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Iztok Kosem, Kristina Koppel, Tanara Zingano Kuhn, Jan Michelfeit, Carole Tiberius, Identification and automatic extraction of good dictionary examples: the case(s) of GDEX, International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 32, Issue 2, June 2019, Pages 119–137, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecy014
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1. Introduction
Examples have always been an important part of a dictionary entry. As Rundell and Atkins (2008: 454) point out, ‘you sometimes find that an entry is almost incomprehensible without its examples.’ This argument is strengthened by the recent findings of Frankenberg-Garcia (2012, 2014) that several corpus examples can sometimes be even more useful than the definition.
Selecting examples is a great challenge to lexicographers, not only because they need to find examples that meet criteria of a good dictionary example (criteria may differ depending on the target users) but also because the sources of examples, i.e. corpora, are getting larger and larger, nowadays containing several billion words or more, and it is inconceivable that lexicographers would examine every single occurrence of every dictionary word to find the best examples of its use. This is why during the last decade a lot of research and development has been put into language technologies that can assist lexicographers in finding good dictionary examples. One such technology is the GDEX tool (Good Dictionary EXamples; Kilgarriff et al. 2008), which was one of the first example extraction tools available, and has so far been used not only in lexicography, but also in language teaching and learning.
