A Design Proposal of an Online Corpus-Driven Dictionary of Portuguese for University Students

Abstract

The objective of this PhD project was to propose the design of an online corpus-driven dictionary of Portuguese for university students (DOPU), aimed at both speakers of Portuguese as a mother tongue and as an additional language and covering Brazilian and European Portuguese varieties. For that, the highly innovative semi-automated approach to dictionary-making (Gantar, Kosem and Krek 2016) was adopted, which involves automatic extraction of data from the corpus and import into dictionary writing system. As a method that had never been applied for lexicographical projects of the Portuguese language, it was necessary to experiment the approach for the first time. Thus, all the required pre-requisites were newly developed, namely, a corpus of academic texts, sketch grammar, GDEX configuration, and a specially-tailored procedure for automatic extraction of data. The experiment indicated that not only can this approach be successfully used as a means to provide lexical content for the design of DOPU, but it can also be beneficial to other lexicographical projects of Portuguese.