LINGUIST List 8.504

Sat Apr 12 1997

Sum: Electronic Dictionary

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <seelylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Ping Li, Sum: Electronic Dictionary on CD-ROM

Dear LINGUIST colleagues,

A few weeks ago I sent out an email inquiry on electronic
dictionaries of English. I would like to thank the following people
for their kind replies:

Helmut Feldweg
Lance Eccles
Richard Cook
Sean Burke
James Vanden Bosch
Guillaume Gantard
Patrizia Bonaventura
Akai Joanne
Kirk Fraser

They have pointed out that there are many CD-ROM dictionaries on the
market, for example:

Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) 
Webster's New World dictionary, 3rd college edition (1988)
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE)
Oxford English Dictionary
American Heritage dictionary
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary (10th ed.)
Macquarie Dictionary (for Australian English)

However, what I have been looking for is an electronic dictionary 
whose lexical items and definitions are readable directly in 
plain ASCII texts (on which I can run standard UNIX search or data
manipulation commands). Although all of the electronic dictionaries 
on CD-ROM do have underlying plain ASCII texts, these texts are
encrypted and extraction or manipulation on them cause copyright
violations. Sean Burke did point out that the Project Gutenberg 
has released an e-text version of Webster's Unabridged (1913) 
and it can be queried at: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/
forms_unrest/webster.form.html. The SGML source files (45mb, in pieces) 
can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.prairienet.org/pub/providers/
gutenberg/etext96/. Helmut Feldweg also pointed out that Longman 
has just released LDOCE on CD-ROM suitable for NLP purposes.

Once again, I want to thank the colleagues who shared their very
useful information with me.

Sincerely,

Ping Li 

Ping Li, Ph.D. 				Email: pingcogsci.richmond.edu
Department of Psychology 	http://www.urich.edu/~pli/
University of Richmond			Phone: (804) 289-8125
Richmond, VA 23173			Fax: (804) 289-8943