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Description
This paper is about the evolution of contemporary lexicography, its status, and prospects. The advent of English pedagogical lexicography, with major milestones in the 1930s (monolingual learner’s dictionaries) and 1980s (bilingual learner’s and corpus-based dictionaries), has been a source of inspiration for modern lexicography, incorporating its breakthroughs and innovations in many languages worldwide over the last generation. The great wave of change in society and technology toward the end of the twentieth century then gave way to new questions and doubts about the role, necessity, usefulness, and adaptation of dictionaries, first in view of the passage from print to digital and then in relation to natural language processing, facing competitive applications for spellchecking, audio pronunciation, machine translation, e-learning, information retrieval, and more. However, in this century, the gloomy forecasts about 'the future of the dictionary' have been replaced by a tour de force of the increasingly abundant availability of ever more dictionaries for ever more users. During the last decade, interoperability with big, linked, and open data, multilingual knowledge management, machine learning, language models and the like, are shaping new opportunities for lexicography within human-machine interaction and the AI era, such as offering expert parallel corpora for training translation models, refining globalization and localization processes, enhancing domain classification for languages for special purposes, leveraging low-resourced languages, empowering users, or assisting with named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, etc. We will analyze the highlights of this ongoing evolution and describe the main prospects for lexicography in the foreseeable future.
