Resumen de A jellyfish dictionary for Arabic
Mohammed Attia, Josef van Genabith
In a festschrift to Martin Gellerstam (Gottlieb and Mogensen, 2007), an article was published by John Sinclair in which he introduced the concept of a jellyfish dictionary. It presented the idea of a self-updating dictionary that is able to automatically monitor language change. "It would, so to speak, float on top of a corpus, rather like a jelly-fish, its tendrils constantly sensing the state of the language." We think that an electronic jellyfish dictionary should be able to perform three major tasks. It should be able to tell which words have newly appeared in a language, which words are not in use anymore, and which word usages or senses have changed based on contemporary data. In this paper we explain our methodology for realizing a jellyfish dictionary for Arabic by automatically performing the three tasks: detecting new words, flagging obsolete words, and discovering word senses.
