ABSTRACT
The availability of raw and summarized natural language databases for lexicographic use online and in other digital formats has been steadily increasing since the late twentieth century. The application of traditional lexicographic skills to the new and emerging data sources, along with the greatly expanded possibilities of information provision that online lexical reference provides, enable lexicographers to craft extremely detailed and rich entries for dictionary consumers; entries that go far beyond the old-fashioned paradigm of a word followed by definitions of its senses and occasional examples. The problem of classification of nouns is more nuanced but certainly worth the small amount of time that the lexicographer should spend on it with a view to getting it right. A long-standing criticism of traditional dictionaries in the natural language processing (NLP) community is their ontological inconsistency, which results in their being unreliable for computational tasks.
