Dictionary Express

What we do?

We at Lexical Computing create dictionaries, glossaries of terms and lexical databases or update existing ones to the specifications of our clients.

Whether print or electronic, our Dictionary Express method makes the dictionary editing process much faster, cheaper and more efficient. The cost and delivery times are only a fraction of what a traditional dictionary editing process would require.

The Dictionary Express method combines the best of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, corpus linguistics and manual data validation into a single package to deliver modern, state-of-the-art, corpus-driven dictionaries, lexical databases and similar lexicographic works.

The approach was developed, trialled and tested by Lexical Computing, the company behind the Sketch Engine corpus query system.

Clients and users

We invite publishers, web content developers, software companies and terminology managers to contact us and request a new dictionary, glossary or database to be built using the Dictionary Express method.

The process can be carried by Lexical Computing only or in collaboration with the client.

Fast and cost-effective

Developing dictionary content from scratch is both slow and expensive, and requires highly-skilled and trained linguists and lexicographers.

Dictionary Express makes the process faster and cost-effective by using AI augmented with the latest NLP and statistical methods. The content is generated  automatically from corpus data. This dictionary draft is then validated and post-edited by human editors. The procedure abandons the traditional A to Z approach and replaces it with component-by-component editing. While dictionaries typically require many years or decades to be produced, our approach reduces the production time to months.