Visual networks as a means of representing collocational information in electronic dictionaries

Abstract

The digital turn in lexicography has paved the way to new techniques for presenting information in dictionaries. This paper explores the potential of collocational networks (Phillips 1983, Williams 1998) as key lexicographical tools to represent information about lexical combinatorics. Collocational networks, which had initially been used as a means of identifying collocations in large corpora, must now be rethought in order to assist non-expert dictionary users in text production by allowing them to find the exact collocates they are looking for, as well as by offering the grammatical information needed to use collocations accurately. We advocate improving networks by incorporating information visualization techniques (Ware 2008, Pham 2012). Specifically, we suggest a number of measures which may be taken to both simplify access to the information provided by raw output from corpora —much of which may be noise for the dictionary user— and to enrich such collocational data by means of visually-explained relevant grammatical information.