GDEX: Automatically Finding Good Dictionary Examples in a Corpus

Users appreciate examples. If a dictionary entry includes contextualized examples of the different senses a word may have, then the user generally gets what they want in a quick and straightforward way. Thus, there are grounds for including lots of examples and contexts. Producing good examples, however, can be labour-intensive, thus, expensive. We automatically found good candidate sentences in a corpus, with which lexicographers could work. The technology used to add examples to an online version of a leading dictionary: we describe and evaluate the project. We consider a range of other ways in which the finding of good examples can bridge the gap between corpuses, dictionaries, and language learning.