A Computer-Assisted Dictionary-Making System for Chinese English Learner's Dictionary

The paper reports our computer-assisted dictionary-making system for English-Chinese learner's dictionary. The system aims to enhance language quality and format consistency in dictionary compilation, which is realized by a number of linguistic analyzing modules and editorial assistant tools. The system embeds a) a concordancer of equivalent words in English-Chinese bilingual corpora based on probability coefficients, b) a collocation extraction tool over grammatical relations by shallow syntactic parsing, and c) a colligation finder based on part-of-speech tagged corpora. All these lead to better language quality of learner's dictionaries. In addition, a desktop publishing tool and database human-machine interface are implemented to ensure format consistency in the entries produced by different lexicographers, thereby contributing to the quality of the dictionaries. The system streamlines and optimizes the processes of compiling, revising, editing, proofreading and type-setting. It distinguishes itself from other similar systems in that it pays more attentions to learners with much information derived from bilingual and learner's corpora by statistical techniques and shallow parsing.