Round table

The field of Natural Language Processing continues to make progress in addressing major challenges such as machine translation, multilingual search, word-sense disambiguation, and text remediation. And for some time, dictionary-makers have been exploiting the fruits of NLP research. As this collaboration continues, opportunities arise for developing various applications and tools which, collectively, perform the same functions as ‘the dictionary’.

The e-lexicography conference series is premised on the idea that print-based dictionaries will largely disappear, as content migrates to digital media. But what sort of future does the dictionary have in any medium – is the e-dictionary just another step on the way to extinction, or will older modes persist alongside new types of resource?

	ADAM KILGARRIFF is Director of Lexical Computing Ltd. which has developed the Sketch Engine, a leading tool for corpus research. His scientific interests lie at the intersection of computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and dictionary-making. Following a PhD on "Polysemy" from Sussex University, he has worked at Longman Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, and the University of Brighton, and is now Director of the Lexicography MasterClass  as well as Lexical Computing Ltd. He is Visiting Research Fellow at the Universities of Leeds and Sussex. He started the SENSEVAL initiative on automatic word sense disambiguation and is now active in moves to make the web available as a linguists' corpus. He was the founding chair of ACL-SIGWAC (Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Web as Corpus) and has been chair of the ACL-SIG on the lexicon and Board member of EURALEX (European Association for Lexicography). See also http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk.
	CAROLE TIBERIUS is a computational linguist at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL). She has a background in translation and computational linguistics. She is currently involved in the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek (ANW) project, a comprehensive online dictionary of contemporary standard Dutch. She is also coordinating the IT side of a five year national project, the Language Portal, which aims to create a virtual language institute for the grammars of Dutch and Frisian.
	ERIN McKEAN likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is the CEO of the new online dictionary Wordnik. She was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries at Pearson Scott Foresman, and was recently the editor-in-chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd edition. She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries. She is the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That’s Amore (also about words).
	MAGALI PAQUOT is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, University of Louvain, Belgium. Her research interests include academic vocabulary, phraseology, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing and pedagogical lexicography. She is currently working on the Louvain English for Academic purposes Dictionary (LEAD), a web-based dictionary-cum-writing-aid-tool of c. 900 academic words and phrases that is customizable according to users’ mother tongue background and the discipline in which users need to write (e.g. business or medicine).
	MICHAEL RUNDELL has been a professional lexicographer since 1980. He has managed numerous dictionary projects, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan range of learner’s dictionaries. He has been involved in the development of several corpora (including the BNC) and has been at the forefront of applying computational techniques to the analysis of corpus data and the compilation of dictionary text. He has published widely in the field of corpus-based lexicography, and is co-author (with Sue Atkins) of the Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography (2008). Michael Rundell’s career is bookended by two major revolutions in lexicography: the arrival of corpora, and the transfer of reference resources from print to digital media. With the second of these revolutions still in its early stages, he finds himself on a new learning curve, as the nature of the dictionary business undergoes another transformation.
	PIEK VOSSEN is Professor of Computational Lexicology at the Faculty of Arts of the VU University Amsterdam. He worked in many international projects (Acquilex I and II, Sift, EAGLES/ISLE, EuroWordNet I and II, EuroTerm, BalkaNet, Meaning, Arabic Wordnet, FlareNet, Kyoto) and national projects (Links, Like, Cornetto, DutchSemCor, From Text to Political Positions, the Semantics of History). He was the site manager in the Sift project and the coordinator of the European projects EuroWordNet and Kyoto. He organised several workshops on wordnets (EACL/ACL in Madrid 1997, EACL/ACL-Senseval in Toulouse 2001) and 6 conferences (Euralex 1998 conference in Amsterdam, 4 Global Wordnet Conferences: 2002 in Mysore India, 2004 in Brno Czech, 2006 in Korea and 2010 in Mumbai, the First International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration (IWIC) in 2007, Kyoto). He is active in the standardization of ontologies, wordnets and lexical semantic resources. In 1999, he joined Sail-Labs as a senior researcher and manager, and from 2001 till 2009 he was CTO at another language technology company in Delft, the Netherlands, called Irion Technologies. He is a co-founder and co-president of the Global Wordnet Association (GWA), together with Dr. Christiane Fellbaum from Princeton University.

The round table was moderated by Simon Krek.