Screffva: A Lexicographer’s Workbench

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation of Screffva, a computer system written in Prolog that employs a parallel corpus for the automatic generation of bilingual dictionary entries. Screffva provides a lemmatised interface between a parallel corpus and its bilingual dictionary. The system has been trialled with a parallel corpus of Cornish-English bitext. Screffva is able to retrieve any given segment of text, and uniquely identifies lexemes and the equivalences that exist between the lexical items in a bitext. Furthermore the system is able to cope with discontinuous multiword lexemes. The system is thus able to find glosses for individual lexical items or to produce longer lexical entries which include part-of-speech, glosses and example sentences from the corpus. The corpus is converted to a Prolog text database and lemmatised. Equivalents are then aligned. Finally Prolog predicates are defined for the retrieval of glosses, part-of-speech and example sentences to illustrate usage. Lexemes, including discontinuous multiword lexemes, are uniquely identified by the system and indexed to their respective segments of the corpus. Insofar as the system is able to identify specific translation equivalents in the bitext, the system provides a much more powerful research tool than existing concordancers such as ParaConc, WordSmith, XCorpus and Multiconcord. The system is able to automatically generate a bilingual dictionary which can be exported and used as the basis for a paper dictionary. Alternatively the system can be used directly as an electronic bilingual dictionary.

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