Updates
August 5, 2020
From Dictionaries to Lexical Knowledge
Based in Tel Aviv and published by K Dictionaries, Kernerman Dictionary News is celebrating its 28th issue.
The story of possibly the most widely circulated publication about lexicography in the world is also a story of the convergence of languages, nationalities, technologies and media, reflecting collaboration across continents and among communities, and aiming to promote the discussion about lexicography in contemporary industry and academia. Over the years, KDN has offered a forum for lexicographers, dictionary professionals and others to express ideas and report developments. The inauguration of the new online version in July 2020 also marks the adoption of a new name: K Lexical News.
Since its founding, the newsletter has been evolving in a process largely defined by the omnipresent rise of modern technology and the decline of print. The first issue was published under the title Password News (No.1, July 1994) and subsequently changed to Kernerman Dictionary News (No.2, January 1995), the settled name for over two decades. The first issues – consisting of four to eight pages – mainly presented articles on the pedagogical usefulness of the semi-bilingual dictionary method for learners of English as a foreign language. To some extent, they played a part in marketing the (Password) Kernerman Semi-Bilingual Dictionaries series,originally launched by Lionel Kernerman in 1986, whose success in different countries refueled the debate on translation equivalents in bilingual dictionaries for foreign language learners, and the main target audience tended to be publishers and teachers of English. Beginning with the July 1995 issue (No. 3), publication has occurred once a year in July without exception.
Issue No. 5 (July 1997) featured the first article on computerized semi-bilingual dictionaries, introducing Pass-Q-Word, a sophisticated CD-ROM product for Microsoft Windows applications including interactive multimedia features, which turned out to be ahead of its time and failed commercially. In 1999, the CD-ROM version of Passport Dictionary was launched, an event that raised new technical concerns about the impact of the screen format and multimedia on learners with regard to electronic dictionaries(KDN7). Then, in 2001, the first version of the innovative Globaldix multilingual dictionary was presented (KDN9).
In the early 2000’s, a new graphic design was introduced as KDN began to establish itself as a pioneering publication internationally. Inevitably, the higher status coincided with a substantial increase in the number of pages and contributing authors. Having become a household name in lexicographic circles, the next two decades saw the newsletter continuing to evolve as it featured ever more diverse articles on the nature of dictionaries and the role of lexicography in contemporary life, questioning among other things what a dictionary is today, for whom it is intended, and how it is used. The central argument put forth in Issue No. 10 (July 2002), for example, speculated about the future of dictionaries in the context of lexical applications based on “machines talking to machines,” suggesting the emergence of machine-readable dictionaries and their integration in computational solutions alongside the disappearance of most traditional dictionary publishers.With the advent of language-oriented technology and new consumer demands, KDN continued to develop interest in exploring lexicography in relation to computer science,whereby linguistics and information technology work hand in hand.
Although KDN is not a peer-reviewed or indexed journal, it has produced a corpus of thought-provoking articles which caught the attention of both academic researchers and industry professionals and have been cited in the lexicographic community and beyond. With the help of various leading experts, it has presented innovative ways of evaluating lexicography in the global scene by means of interdisciplinary methodologies,and it continuously promotes international conferences, associations and projects.
Surveying past publications up to the present day reveals how the lexical world and technology have become intertwined. The ubiquity of digital devices and services nowadays has revolutionized the ways in which people use and learn languages. As the role of print waned at the turn of the new millennium, the newsletter began examining ways forward by actively initiating discussions about computational incorporation of lexicographic content. In this regard, once lexical data is made interoperable, and thus compatible with information systems, knowledge graphs, the semantic web, etc., language resources become linked with other lexical data sets, enhancing the process of machine readability and interoperability. In the final analysis, what constitutes lexical data, in contrast to lexicography per se, is the vast variety of applications to digital media (e-books, emails, machine translators, text processing software, information retrieval, personal assistants, etc.) upon which the quality and efficiency of electronic communication depend. In response to the incorporation of language by computers, KDN went beyond the confines of lexicography to embrace broader issues and practices pertaining to language technologies at large, digital humanities, data and knowledge systems, and natural language processing for AI.
Beginning in July 2020, the newsletter is for the first time available online under the new K Lexical News title. The change from dictionary to lexical, however, is not merely symbolic. Rather, it conveys the practical evolution of dictionaries, and specifically their content, into a larger constellation of linguistic information and lexical knowledge aimed to be integrated into technologies that can write, read, speak, listen, understand and coordinate languages. Thus,the relation between the change of name and digitization reflects broadening the coverage as well. As the editor, Ilan Kernerman, describes it, this step will expand “the scope from lexicography in particular to linguistic data in general.”
In the long run, KLN’s new online form marks a major step in diversifying and enlarging the scale of its target audience. Equally significant is the goal to create an improved and linkable reading experience that will shape the way articles are distributed to all readers much more quickly than before. As a result, the increased exposure is expected to promote interactions with other industries in order to establish a deeply integrated network of exchange previously unimagined. As explained by Ilan, “the digitization will make the newsletter more easily accessible and practically useful for readers,more widely disseminated, and more searchable for search engines and linkable to other resources.”
From now on, the content published – on the website, archive and blog alike – will be fully sharable with and among communities online. Whatever the future for K Lexical News holds, it is gradually adapting itself to an ever wider and more connected world.
May 24, 2020
KD cooperate with SuperMemo
K Dictionaries is pleased to announce the cooperation with SuperMemo, an e-learning publisher with over 25 years of experience in offering algorithm-based services and content for language learning.
As part of this one-of-a-kind, wide-scope project, KD will apply innovative methods to automatically generate new data by merging existing resources, thus producing lexicographic sets for 19 language cores with translation into 14 languages each, that is 266 language pairs in total!
SuperMemo offers over 200 high-quality language courses in varying levels and objectives. It has been at the forefront of long-term human memory research, and it specializes in designing vocabulary courses that optimize word retention and language acquisition.
K Dictionaries relies on years of expertise in pedagogical and multilingual dictionary compilation, complemented by its editorial and processing tools, and served by a competent team of lexicographers, linguists and translators, system analysts and software developers.
Read more about the collaboration in SuperMemo’s blog post.
April 20, 2020
OntoLex Wikipedia entry
Ontolex, a prominent vocabulary for representing lexical resources in Linked Data (RDF) format, now has an entry on Wikipedia.
First proposed in 2011, the Ontolex-Lemon model is a continuous effort by the W3C (World wide web consortium) community. It was officially published in 2016 and serves as a de facto standard to represent ontology-lexica on the Web. KD data has been modelled in several iterations according to this model, starting in 2014 (Klimek 2015), then in 2015-2017 in the framework of the LDL4HELTA project, and completing the final model recently in line with the newly added lexicog module (Bosque-Gil et al 2019), which was introduced to handle lexicographic structures and hierarchy.
Over the years, Kernerman Dictionary News published several items regarding Ontolex, which have apparently played a decisive role in obtaining the Wikipedia editorial approval of the new Ontolex page. KDN is the most circulated publication in the field of lexicography, appearing every month of July since 1994.
Congratulations to our friends and colleagues in the OntoLex community for this achievement!
March 27, 2020
KD @ COVID-19
The K Dictionaries team has been working remotely since mid-March, due to the unfolding global pandemic COVID-19 and subsequent instructions to practice social distancing.
Like numerous others worldwide, we now work from home and have had to cancel travel plans to various international events that are either postponed, cancelled or replaced by virtual meetings online. In the meantime,our channels of cooperation continue to grow, starting new academic projects and concluding new commercial ones, on which details will be released in due course.
We are sorry not to be able to meet our colleagues and collaborators in person, and wish you all the best of health. Stay safe!
February 16, 2020
KD data released for TIAD
K Dictionaries is happy to offer 5% of the golden standard data used in the TIAD shared task, to help the participants in the validation phase in assessing results and drawing conclusions in their processes of generating cross-lingual lexicographic data sets automatically.
The objective of TIAD shared tasks is to explore and compare methods and techniques that infer translation equivalents indirectly between language pairs, based on other multilingual resources. The third iteration of TIAD will be part of the Globalex Workshop on Linked Lexicography at LREC 2020 in Marseille, France, on May 8. It follows on the second TIAD that was held in conjunction with the LDK 2019 conference in Leipzig, Germany, producing language pairs among English, French and Portuguese. Full information is available on the workshop website.
January 9, 2020
Ilan Kernerman visits PWSZ
Ilan Kernerman of K Dictionaries will be a guest of the Institute of Modern Languages of the University of Applied Sciences (PWSZ) in Racibórz, Poland, on January 13-14, 2020.
The visit will include two lectures on lexicography-related topics, providing a broad overview of the state-of-the-art (Quo Vadis Lexicography: Background & Perspectives) and a presentation of the K Dictionaries and Lexicala resources (Dictionaries & Cross-lingual Data Sets).
The institute’s announcement is available on the university’s blog (in Polish).
December 19, 2019
Lexicala API available on RapidAPI and ProgammableWeb
As of today, Lexicala API is accessible on RapidAPI – a marketplace for developers to find, connect and manage their API connections.
Users can now subscribe to Lexicala directly through RapidAPI’s payment system and consume the API using a unified, REST format that is easy to understand and integrate, with one API key and a single dashboard that tracks usage for all subscriptions. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Lexicala API has also been added to the ProgrammableWeb API directory – the leading source of news and information on APIs and the web’s most reliable API directory.
December 2, 2019
K Dictionaries welcomes Maya Rudich
KD is delighted to welcome new project manager, Maya Rudich, as part of its editorial team.
Maya is graduating in the humanities multidisciplinary program combined with linguistics from Tel Aviv University. She joins editorial manager, Yifa tBen Moshe, and project manager, Raya Abu Ahmad, and her first projects include the expansion of the Hebrew dictionary core and completion of the Japanese-Korean dictionary. Welcome Maya!
November 12, 2019
Lexicala API new website and features
Lexicala by KD is excited to announce the launch of a new Lexicala API website, which was aired today.
In addition to the previously offered free plan, which permitted 300 calls for non-commercial use, the API now offers the option for a monthly subscription, with 100,000 monthly calls and unlimited data access, allowing commercial use and licensing of the data. Further, the API is now enhanced with more search options, including the possibility to search for inflected forms. Check out the new website at https://api.lexicala.com, and get started with your own account here.
November 6, 2019
Ilan Kernerman interview for LT-Innovate
Following the LTI summit earlier this year, during which Lexicala was awarded the LT-Innovate award of 2019, Ilan Kernerman, CEO of K Dictionaries, was interviewed about the Lexicala operations and business model, and recent developments in the API.
The focus of the interview was the application of lexicographic data in the fields of language technology and natural language processing, and the contribution of Lexicala to these sectors, as well as to mobile app developers, online dictionary websites, and translation, learning and other language service providers. Also discussed was the integration of machine learning and AI in the workflow and in Lexicala services, being an integral aspect of the development and enhancement of language resources in general and lexicography in particular. The interview was published on Monday in LT-Zoom, the language technology blog, and is available here.
September 27, 2019
K Dictionaries & Lexicala Data Workshop @ eLex 2019
KD will hold a workshop on lexicographic data issues in conjunction with the eLex 2019 conference in Sintra, Portugal.
The workshop will cover the following topics:
· automatic generation and manual editing
· formats, standards and the OntoLex lexicog module
· dissemination by API and modes of use
· lexicographic resources and interoperability with other domains
· morphological and other enrichment
The KD team will be led by Ilan Kernerman and present editorial aspects by Yifat Ben Moshe and a hands-on session of Lexicala API by Dorielle Lonke, combined with guest sessions by Julia Bosque Gil (UNIZAR) on the new lexicog module for lexicography of OntoLex-lemon, Jorge Gracia (UNIZAR) on building an interconnected cross-lingual graph using KD data in RDF, and John McCrae (NUIG) on easy dictionary linking though NAISC for the Elexis project.
The workshop will be held at the closure of the conference, on October 3, from 14:15 to 15:45, and participation is open to everyone. Please contact us at lexicala@kdictionaries.com prior to the workshop if you would like to receive API credentials for the hands-on session.
September 22, 2019
K Dictionaries @ META-FORUM 2019
K Dictionaries is honored to be invited to contribute to META-FORUM 2019 in Brussels, which is introducing the European Union’s Horizon 2020-funded project European Language Grid.
We will open the session on European LT Developers and LT Users: Demands and Ideas, on October 9 at 11:45, with a presentation of KD & Lexicala by Ilan Kernerman. For more information, visit https://www.european-language-grid.eu/programme
August 28, 2019
KoreaLex Conference Keynote
lIan Kernerman of KD is travelling to Korea to deliver a keynote at the Korean Association for Lexicography (한국사전학회 – KoreaLex) conference on August 31. The conference is held at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, with the topic of Social Changes and Lexicography.
The presentation – From the first to the last generation: Change in lexicography – will offer an overview of major tendencies and developments in the world of dictionaries and lexicography, reaching back to the twentieth century innovative breakthroughs of English pedagogical lexicography, and looking ahead to novel forms of interoperability and multidisciplinary with computational linguistics and knowledge systems.
In addition, Ilan will visit Kyungpook National University in Daegu as a guest of the Department of Korean Language and Literature, including a talk about the transition to lexical data and new models of cooperation between the industry and academia. Next week he will meet with KD’s partners from Naver Corporation to discuss on-going joint projects and new ones.
August 12, 2019
New RDF conversion in final stages
The past months K Dictionaries has been working on the conversion of data to RDF, in close cooperation with Jorge Gracia (Universidad de Zaragoza) and Julia Bosque-Gil (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), which is now entering its final stages of modelling and validation.
This is the third iteration of converting KD data to RDF, the first attempt carried out in 2014 by Bettina Klimek (Leipzig University), and the second in 2015 as part of the LDL4HELTA project. This iteration features many improvements over the last two, including the adaptation of the recently published lexicog module of the OntoLex-lemon model for Linguistic Linked Data. The past months have been focused on modelling the data according to the new module, applying fixes to the previous conversion attempts, amending rules and changing the structure accordingly, in order to obtain as much coverage as possible of data in RDF, and allow for maximal preservation of the data. The final stages include finishing touches on yet to be modelled components of the data, and beginning a comprehensive stage of validation – including setting up a triple store and using SPARQL to query the RDF data.
Once the conversion is complete, future plans include cross-linking the data and obtaining a cross-lingual lexical data graph, as well as linking KD data to external resources, especially in the context of the EU Horizon 2020 funded Lynx and Elexis projects.
The conversion process and its results are described in detail in a paper by the partners working on the conversion – Julia Bosque-Gil, Dorielle Lonke, Jorge Gracia and Ilan Kernerman – that will be presented at the upcoming eLex conference, which will take place in Sintra, Portugal, in early October 2019.
July 29, 2019
KDN 27 is published
The 2019 issue of Kernerman Dictionary News (KDN, No. 27) has been published this month, and is available in print and online.
The main feature of the current issue consists of the abstracts of thirteen papers from the Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neologism, which was held in conjunction with the 22nd biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America in Bloomington (IN) on May 8, 2019.
In addition, KDN27 presents the new Lexicala API, the European Master in Lexicography programme (EMLex), the Villa Vigoni Theses on Lexicography, the Adam Kilgarriff Prize for 2019, the next META-FORUM (October 2019) and Asialex conference (June 2020), obituaries on Jacek Fisiak and Deny Arnos Kwary, as well as news on K Dictionaries and Lexicala workshops and other activities.
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July 23, 2019
LT-Innovate Award
The new Lexicala API has been presented at the recent LTI Summit, leading to K Dictionaries being awarded the LT-Innovate Award for 2019.
The presentation by Ilan Kernerman, entitled Lexicala API: Transforming dictionary products into lexical data services, was part of the eighth conference of the Language Technology Industry Association, held in Brussels on June 24-25.
July 17, 2019
KD is delighted to announce the official release of Lexicala API!
The Lexicala API, previously available as Beta, has been officially launched on July 11, and is currently available for a trial period for free, offering up to 300 calls per day and unlimited data access.
It allows access to KD’s unique multilingual lexical resources, and includes improved functionalities and flexible search options.
Lexicala API is unique in offering a vast selection of monolingual cores, including numerous languages pairs as well as multilingual translations. The responses feature either complete dictionary entries or specific lexical components, including rich syntactic and semantic information, sense definitions, multilingual expressions, usage examples, synonyms and antonyms,and much more.
Sign up for your own Lexicala API account, and read more here.
March 20, 2019
Lexicala API presentation at LTI Summit
Ilan Kernerman of K Dictionaries will be delivering a presentation on the Lexicala API in the framework of the 8th Language Technology Industry (LTI) Summit, which will be held in Brussels, Belgium on June 24-26, 2019.
The LTI Summit is organized by LT-Innovate, the Language Technology Industry Association, and it brings together technology providers, business leaders, developers and researchers as well as users and integrators in the field of multilingual ambient intelligence. Its purpose is to showcase the latest developments in the fields of speech interaction, deep meaning processing and multilingual communication & cognition, and to strengthen the connection between the different players, creating opportunities for cooperation in the realm of language technologies.
The presentation will focus on recent developments of the API, which is now entering the final testing phase prior to official release, and will highlight the future objectives and business endeavors for Lexicala.
February 26, 2019
Lynx Coding Sprint at Cercedilla
Vova Dzhuranyuk and Dorielle Lonke from K Dictionaries are participating this week in the Coding Sprint for partners of the Lynx project, hosted by Madrid Polytechnic University (UPM) in Cercedilla.
The overall objective of this special event is to develop the first demo versions of the three Lynx use cases, featuring their main functionalities and including tutorials, generation of resources, creation of golden standard for evaluation, development of user interfaces, and integration of translation modules. In addition, the meeting will serve to finalize the RDF conversion details for KD data according to the new lexicog model of lemon-Ontolex for linked data and Semantic Web technologies.
February 18, 2019
K Dictionaries & Lexicala at EMLex meeting
The spring workshop of the European Master of Lexicography (EMLex) will be held at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürenberg on February 18, 2019 and include a presentation of K Dictionaries and Lexicala by Ilan Kernerman.
The focus of the meeting is how to establish and foster cooperation between private companies and scientific lexicography as represented by EMLex, and making acquaintance between students and teachers and company representatives, including also those of Duden, PONS, Zanichelli and Inbenta. KD has been offering internship programs to EMLex students since 2014.
February 14, 2019
New German/Arabic Dictionary by K Dictionaries and PONS
PONS Standardwörterbuch Arabisch, the new German/Arabic dictionary created by K Dictionaries, will be released on February 18, 2019; PONS is publishing the print edition in Germany, in conjunction with the new online dictionary website launched by KD at pons.lexicala.com.
This 40,000-entry Arabic-German / German Arabic dictionary is part of KD’s Global series and is fully up-to-date. The Arabic core has been thoroughly revised over the last three years, and translated to German, and it is complemented by the updated German-Arabic part. The PONS edition is without the approximately 50,000 usage examples and their translations, which are part of the complete Global resource, but offers detailed translation equivalents for the different senses and relevant grammatical information in the PONS bilingual dictionary tradition.
PONS has been one of Germany’s leading dictionary and language publishers for the last 40 years, and is part of the Stuttgart-based Klett Group. https://en.pons.com/translate.
February 10, 2019
Translation Inference Across Dictionaries (TIAD) Shared Task & Workshop
The second shared task and workshop on Translation Inference Across Dictionaries (TIAD 2019) will be held in conjunction with the second conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK2019) in Leipzig, Germany, on May 20, 2019.
TIAD is aimed at exploring methods and techniques for generating new bilingual (and multilingual) dictionaries automatically from existing ones, while enabling reliable validation of the results obtained and solid comparison of the processes used.
Participants are invited to auto-generate new translations based on preexisting translations contained within the Apertium RDF graph, among language pairs of English, French and Portuguese, which are not directly connected in the graph. The results will be compared against manually compiled data of K Dictionaries and other resources, and presented during the workshop. For more information, visit https://tiad2019.unizar.es/index.html.
January 16, 2019
Globalex Workshop on Lexicography & Neologism
The Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neologism (GWLN 2019) will be held in conjunction with DSNA 22, the 22nd biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, at Indiana University, Bloomington, on May 8, 2019.
GWLN 2019 will focus on issues related to the detection of neologisms – including new words, new meanings of existing words, and new multiword units – and their representation in lexicography and dictionaries, such as:
· How to find neologisms (corpus analysis and editorial means of identification; evaluation of data, e.g. blogs and chats)
· How to interoperate lexicographic datasets with online resources and incorporate neologisms into the digital dictionary (the media, formatting, labeling, etc.)
· How to deal with grammatical/orthographic/pronunciation variation (descriptive vs.prescriptive)
· How to explain meaning with/without encyclopedic information, and how to use illustrations and audio-visual media
· How differently, if at all, should neologisms be treated in different dictionary types (e.g. in historical comprehensive ones as opposed to those focusing on current usage; in monolingual vs. bilingual dictionaries; in special domain dictionaries)
· How to deal with neologisms that are no longer new and those no longer used
· How can dictionary users help with finding and informing about neologisms
The workshop will include 14 papers by 19 participants from Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Israel, Japan, Korea, Netherlands,South Africa, Spain, and the USA. The proceedings will be available online on the Globalex website and published as a special issue of the DSNA journal Dictionaries,and the abstracts will be published in Kernerman Dictionary News.
GWLN 2019 is co-organized by Annette Klosa-Kückelhaus (IDS, Institute of the German Language) and Ilan Kernerman (K Dictionaries).
GLOBALEX, Global Association for Lexicography. https://globalex.link
DSNA 22. https://www.indiana.edu/~iucweb/dsna
January 10, 2019
Adam Kilgarriff Prize 2019 Winner
The second Adam Kilgarriff Prize will be awarded this year to Matt Kohl for his solo project, The Right Rhymes – an interactive, evidence-based dictionary of hip-hop slang and expressions, including definitions and examples from rap lyrics.
The prize has been established in 2016 in memory of Adam Kilgarriff, who passed away in 2015, and is awarded biennially in conjunction with the eLex conference series. Its purpose is to recognize outstanding accomplishments in the fields that were of particular interest to Adam and to which he contributed immensely, mainly corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and lexicography. There were nine applications for the 2019 prize, and Matt Kohl’s submission was selected by the board of trustees due to its impressive employment of current technologies and strong design skills.
More information is available at kilgarriff.co.uk/prize.
January 2, 2019
DPS Integrated into KD Workflow
Six months after its initial introduction, the integration of DPS (Digital Processing System) dictionary writing tool into the editorial workflow of K Dictionaries is complete, with editors and translators utilizing the system for their projects since December 2018.
For many years, KD has relied almost entirely on its own self-developed working tools. The shift to DPS is part of a wider strategic move to reinforce and upgrade the data creation, manipulation and dissemination of Lexicala. Initial responses to the change from KD’s editors and translators have been positive and correspond to the successful implementation of DPS by KD in-house as well.
DPS, a leading content management solution for lexicographic resources in XML form, is powered by IDM and serves major dictionary makers worldwide. The system is designed to handle large datasets and significantly facilitates the editorial process, data processing and publication tasks.
December 26, 2018
Eleven New Interns from Istanbul University
Eleven students from the Department of Turkish at Istanbul University, led by Mehmet Gürlek, began a six-month internship program at K Dictionaries.
The main focus of their internship is related to KD’s Global Turkish Dictionary, of which Dr Gürlek is chief editor. The interns’ first task is to review corpora-based frequency lists of Turkish words, which will ultimately serve as a basis for the development of the list of headwords for the second part of this dictionary. Once the new headword list will be concluded, the students will be involved in various practical tasks regarding the compilation of new entries under the supervision of Dr Gürlek.
Mehmet Gürlek hastaken over the editorship of Global Turkish Dictionary in 2016, and he is also the convener of Asialex 2019 conference. The students participating in this project are Cansu Akkaya, Züleyha Altunkaynak, Gressaİpek Balcı, Ceren Görücü, Berkay Havuk, Yiğithan Kocaoğlu, Tahir Meylani, Kaan Tuglaci, Kaan Turan, Nazlican Turkmen and Necatican Yildirim.
The K Dictionaries internship program enables students of lexicography and related fields, such as linguistics, translation, language learning, data sciences, etc, to gain experience in hands-on lexical work, including research, compilation, translation, post-editing and quality assurance.
December 19, 2018
Business Models & Strategies for Lexicography (II)
Dr Henrik Køhler Simonsen, from Copenhagen Business School and SmartLearning, held an eight-day visit to K Dictionaries, on a grant from ELEXIS Transnational Visit program, aimed to carry out part of his research project on Business Models & Strategies for Lexicography.
During his visit, Henrik presented business models and strategies for lexicography and explored approaches for digital marketing. The visit concluded in an international online workshop involving experts from related domains – featuring Kasper Fisker from Ordbogen.com, Ilan Kernerman from K Dictionaries, Jens Kjærum from Dictus, and Tomer Mahlin from IBM – and rendered many valuable insights and future ideas for development.
The KD team very much enjoyed and benefited from Henrik’s stay, and would like to thank him for a lovely visit. We hope to see you again very soon!
December 5, 2018
Business Models and Strategies for Lexicography
Dr Henrik Køhler Simonsen, of Copenhagen Business School and SmartLearning, will be a guest of K Dictionaries from December 6 to 16, in the framework of the ELEXIS Transnational Visit Program, to carry out his project on Business Models & Strategies for Lexicography.
This ELEXIS research travel grant will enable Henrik to hold a series of interviews, presentations and workshops at the KD premises. The objectives are to examine, record and generate insights, ideas and strategies on alternative business models for lexicography, including reflections on technologies, platforms, standards, user groups, applications, eco systems, revenue streams, and interoperability with other domains. The project involves experts from related domains such as computational linguistics, artificial Intelligence, machine learning, data and knowledge sciences, digital publishing and business development, and will include an international online workshop on December 13.
Henrik holds an MA in Business Communication, an MBA in Emergent Management and a PhD in Corporate Lexicography. He is an external lecturer at Copenhagen Business School and Resource & Project Director at SmartLearning, and he works with digital business models, digital learning, lexicography and business development [Linked-In].
December 3, 2018
Linked Data Workshop @ KD – Success!
The linked data workshop held last week at the KD offices was a great success, helping KD team members to attain a broader understanding of Linguistic Linked Data concepts and RDF, and to establish a solid foundation for further development of Lexicala resources.
Besides expanding their background on Linked Data and gaining deeper insight into OntoLex-Lemon adaptations, the team took part in a hands-on session experimenting in mapping lexicographic data into RDF vocabularies by generating N-triples, uploading onto a triple-store (Fuseki), and querying the results using SPRQL.
It has been a pleasure to host once again Jorge Gracia (UNIZAR) and Julia Bosque-Gil (UPM), who brought along exceptionally mild and beautiful autumn days, and led a wonderful session.
November 22, 2018
Linked Data Workshop @ KD
Jorge Gracia (Universidad de Zaragoza) and Julia Bosque-Gil (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, UPM) will be visiting the K Dictionaries offices in Tel Aviv on November 25-26 to provide technical training on Linguistic Linked Data for the KD team.
The session will highlight the essentials of RDF (Resource Description Framework) serializations and the OntoLex-Lemon model, plan further conversion into RDF and JSON-LD of KD data sets from the Global series and other dictionaries, and linking of external resources in the context of the EU Horizon 2020-funded Lynx and ELEXIS projects.
The first KD data to be converted into RDF was the Global German lexical set, as part of an internship by Bettina Klimek from Leipzig University in 2014-2015, using the LEMON model. Then, the German, Spanish and English sets were converted in 2015-2016 for the LDL4HELTA project in line with the OntoLex model at the Ontology Engineering Group of UPM.
July 12, 2018
New Interns at K Dictionaries
Alina Mihaela Paduraru, Josep Elias Zakhir Puig and Tetiana Khimic, from the department of English studies at Universitat Jaume I in Castello, Spain, have finished a six-month internship period, focused on editing translations in an English-Spanish learner’s dictionary.
The new interns are all students from the European Master of Lexicography program. Gulzhazira Yesmakhanova and Yuliia Bolbit will be post-editing automatically generated frequency lists that will serve to develop headword lists for Kazakh and Ukrainian dictionaries respectively, and Mochamad Wahyu Hidayat will work on German to Indonesian dictionary translations.
K Dictionaries has been running internship programs with universities in Europe and elsewhere for over ten years. We would like to bid farewell and thanks to the departing interns and are happy to welcome the new ones.
June 14, 2018
KD & LEXICALA Seminar at Euralex
K Dictionaries will be leading a seminar as part of the Euralex 2018 conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The seminar will take place on July 17, from 10:00 to 12:30, and will present an overview of KD’s resources and related methodologies, featuring: data macrostructure and entry microstructure (mapping the language DNA); manual compilation, automatic generation and post-editing; translation and cross-lingualization; editorial and data processing tools; adapting to new formats and methodologies; accessing multi-layer lexical data through an API; working with lexicographers around the world; collaborating with industrial, academic and professional partners; and KD’s student training and internship program. In addition to the KD team, the seminar will include guest presentations by Arleta Adamska-Sałaciak (AMU, Poznań), Philippe Climent (IDM, France), Margit Langemets (Estonian Language Institute, EKI) and John McCrae (Insight NUI, Galway), Full details are available on the conference website.
June 5, 2018
KD Starts Collaboration with IDM
IDM visited the KD offices in Tel Aviv last week, to introduce DPS (Digital Processing System) for implementation into KD’s workflow and to discuss future cooperation.
DPS is a leading solution for developing and publishing lexicographic resources in XML form, facilitating work for editors, translators and programmers, and allowing simultaneous work and better integration of the data. The KD team underwent intensive three-day training by IDM’s Allan Orsnes, and is starting to transfer work onto the DPS platform. The integration of DPS marks a major technical policy shift for KD, which has so far tended to rely almost entirely on its own in-house editorial, processing and dissemination tools, and the visit also served for planning further closer collaboration between KD and IDM.
May 10, 2018
Adam Kilgarriff Memorial Hike
A mountain hike in memory of Adam Kilgarriff will be held in Slovenia on July 20, 2018, following the Euralex conference.
This is an annual commemoration of the hike to the top of Grintavec mountain taken by Adam and his friends in July 2014. This year’s hike will have two itineraries: one consists of a fairly easy hike and lasts 1.5 hours; the second is more challenging, continuing up to the summit of Begunjšica mountain, over 2,000 meters above sea level, and will take another two hours. The descent takes two hours, in either path. See the full details here.
April 30, 2018
Introducing LEXICALA
K DICTIONARIES is delighted to introduce the new website and API, all under the new LEXICALA brand.
K DICTIONARIES was established in 1993 and is celebrating its 25th jubilee in 2018. From a provider of innovative dictionary content, we have evolved into a worldwide creator and disseminator of smart and unique cross-lingual lexical data serving a wide scope of language technology applications. LEXICALA is at the heart of this transformation and is an extension from the dictionary world to computational linguistics, presented both at the forefront of this new website and as the brand name of the new API that brings together the major resources of K DICTIONARIES for over 50 languages.