In the information age we have more accessible data than ever before. At the same time there is undoubtedly a greater information need than ever before. We can distinguish between at least three types of information needs: communicative, cognitive and operational. Dictionaries will normally focus on one or more communicative functions, encyclopaedias normally on cognitive functions, user guides and manuals focus on operational functions. To perform such functions, we need reference books containing the necessary data. This is a main topic both in metalexicography and in terminography. Far less observations have been made to the no less important question: How and especially how quick can the user get access to the data ?

In this article will be examined how some large dictionaries and encyclopedias that are available now on CD-Rom have been computerized, and what new possibilities for consultation and research these CD-Rom offer as compared to the printed version from which they originate.

The dictionary evolved from medieval glosses that explained fragments of discourse in their contexts. Those fragments were later collected, then classified and reduced to their simplest forms, ie words. The most important aspect of that evolution from the gloss to the dictionary is that the fragment to be explained was decontextualized, extracted from discourse. The main objective of the dictionary is to give an image of the system. It is now possible to improve the dictionary in its role as a tool for explaining discourse. It cannot provide explanations that would be adapted to every single context, but it can give to the user a huge quantity of discourse, and provide explanations that would be more closely adapted to every occurrence or type of occurrence. Lexicographers would be well advised to investigate those new possibilities.

Natural Language Processing systems (e.g. machine translation, information retrieval or generation systems) require large lexical resources which prove extremely costly to build. The automatic or semi-automatic construction of electronic dictionaries is now recognized as a sine qua non in any NLP project and a lot of attention is being paid to methods and tools for acquiring, coding and formalizing the linguistic properties of lexical items appearing in the texts to be processed. This paper deals with the formalization of lexical-semantic relations in computerized dictionaries, focusing more particularly on a few research projects funded by the European Union.

Physical objects are often described in dictionaries by visual features. But the information needed by computer applications for image analysis is not always found in dictionaries, nor in a complete form in any other publicly available information source. This article describes some first steps in finding more complete visual information about objects that could be used to enhance computer usable dictionaries and other knowledge repositories. We show that some information about the common colors of objects can be extracted automatically from text found on the Web.

Many more dictionaries are being updated than are written from scratch. Taylor-made computational linguistic support for lexicographers should thus not only provide corpus-derived data, but, along with this, a comparison with the information given in the targeted dictionary. We are developing a system for German, which provides this kind of comparison, for a set a macro- and microstructural data. We report about the main lexicographic and computational aspects of the approach.

In the past decade, technology has had a major impact on the activities of the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL). The results include three electronic dictionaries, covering the period from 1200 up to 1976, and some linguistically annotated text corpora of historical and present-day Dutch. Three present-day corpora have been widely used not only for lexicography but also for many other purposes, since becoming accessible over the Internet in 1994. Advanced technology will have even more importance for a project recently started, the Integrated Language Database of 8th-21st Century Dutch, in which the dictionaries, lexica and a diachronic text corpus will be linked in a meaningful way. Parts of the database will be linked with comparable data collections at other institutes, thus creating a supra-institutional research instrument which will provide new opportunities for innovative research.

Online tourist guides are information tools communicating destination image and specialised knowledge at the same time. They feature a large variety of lexicographic structures including word lists, articles, conceptual schemes, indexes and registers, search options on keywords, internal and external cross references etc. This is by no means surprising in so far as what is needed is effective data access in order to extract information – precisely in the same way as in lexicography. The functional thesis we defend in this article is that lexicographisation in a user perspective can improve the access process. Taking œnotouristic online guides as a case in point, we will examine different user situations leading to consultation, in particular the need for experiential information, in which users simply wish to improve the conditions of their œnotouristic experience. We will then formulate theoretical proposals aimed at ensuring better interaction of lexicographic functions, data presentation and access possibilities.

In the present paper we offer some reflexions on the lexicographic study of discourse particles. Setting out from the analysis of emotive evaluative Spanish adverbs, we try to emphasize the difficulties with dictionary use for the learning of the discourse functions of these units. Following a presentation of the dictionaries’ contributions, we suggest a method for the lexicographic definition and explanation of the given words in terms of discursive instructions and communicative intentions. This model enables us to resolve certain problems and to illustrate the principal similarities and differences between analogous evaluative expressions.

The computerization of dictionaries has appreciably modified our reflection on lexical structures. This paper aims to demonstrate a few dichotomies in bilingual semantic parallelisms, with the aid of French-Hungarian examples taken from a future electronic dictionary. These functional oppositions are devised as compilation principles defining lexicographical entry or item structures.

In this article we aim to present the architecture of the database WordNet, organised in order to represent conceptual relations, and set up initially for the English language, as well as its extensions made under the name of EuroWordNet for seven other European languages.