Keynote speakers

Generating resources for the lexicography of                      under-resourced languages

Gregory Grefenstette is Chief Science Officer at Exalead. He received his B.S. from Stanford University in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993. He has been Principal Scientist at the Xerox Research Centre (1993-2001), with Clairvoyance (2001-2003) and at the French applied research centre, the CEA (2001-2008). His research interests range from most subjects in Natural Language Processing to all aspects of Information Retrieval. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Natural Language Engineering, and he edited the first book on Cross Language Information Retrieval (Kluwer 1998).

Internet lexicography: requirements, concepts, research approaches

Annette Klosa is a researcher at the Institute for German Language, Mannheim, Germany. She is chief editor of the German online dictionary elexiko and coordinator of the scientific network “Internetlexikografie” (supported by the German Research Foundation DFG). Her research interests include internet lexicography, corpus-based vs prescriptive lexicography, research into the use of dictionaries, grammar in dictionaries, and onomastics.

  Why do we take for granted that words have meanings?

Arvi Tavast manages the language technology department at the Institute of the Estonian Language and teaches terminology and translation at Tallinn University and University of Tartu. His central research interest is folk language philosophy: how both laypersons and language professionals conceptualize language, and how this influences their linguistic and metalinguistic behaviour, including the compilation and use of dictionaries. One of his current projects is the Estonian-Latvian and Latvian-Estonian dictionary, an attempt to apply technical onomasiology to general language. It is aimed at a 50% reduction in preparation time, but brings along a variety of challenges for the way lexicographers normally think about dictionaries.

  Leveraging dictionaries to build web-scale language technologies

Ryan McDonald is a Research Scientist at Google. Before joining Google, Ryan received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto. Ryan’s thesis focused on the problem of syntactic dependency parsing. His work allowed complex linguistic constructions to be modeled in a direct and efficient way, which enabled high accuracy parsers for a wide variety of languages. Since joining Google, Ryan has continued to work on syntactic analysis, in particular, extending statistical models learned on resource rich languages, like English, to resource poor languages in order to build systems that can analyze sentences from all the world’s languages. Ryan’s research also addresses how these systems can be used to improve the quality of a number of important user-facing technologies, such as search, machine translation, and sentiment analysis.

Simpson1 What would Dr Murray have made of it all?
OED lexicography a hundred years on

John Simpson joined the Oxford English Dictionary in 1976, has been its Chief Editor since 1993, and took it online in 2000. In 1999 he was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the Australian National University for his ‘distinguished creative achievement as a scholar in lexicography’. He is a member of the Philological Society (where the idea of the Dictionary was first mooted in the 1850s) and of the English Faculty in Oxford, and is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. He edited the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (1982) and co-edited the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (1992). His introductions to Robert Cawdrey’s English dictionary (1604), B.E.’s Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1699), Francis Grose’s Popular Superstitions (1787), and James Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909) have been published by the Bodleian Library.