Speakers
Description
Electronic dictionaries have replaced most paper dictionaries and have become the primary learning tools in assisting L2 learners in expanding their lexical repertoire. Generally, users tend to assume the definitions in E-dictionaries are reliable and barely question the validity of the descriptions provided. The accuracy of major E-dictionaries is not commonly challenged, and the formation of online dictionary corpora is rarely discussed. Moreover, the study of dictionary use is rather limited, especially E-dictionary problems. This study takes a combined research approach of experiment, survey, and dictionary critique to investigate the most popular E-dictionary in China – Youdao. The experiment included retrospection and translation test with the purpose of finding out how E-dictionary can affect student learning. Over a hundred students in different disciplines were asked to translate sentences that included insufficiently defined words in Youdao dictionary. The dictionary consultation process was recorded to observe how some deficient definitions influence participants' understanding of the words. It is found that E-dictionaries with errors of incomplete and/or inaccurate definitions could lead to students’ misinterpretation of the sentence. In addition, student consultation habits were found problematic. The causes of the deficient word definitions are also explained from a data processing point of view. For instance, translation mistakes are integrated by the application of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technology in online dictionaries. It is suggested that the dictionary skills of users should be further trained, and improvement of online dictionaries should also be made with better AI technologies.
