An overview of Digital Lexicography and directions for its future: An interview with Gilles-Maurice de Schryver

In this contribution Rove Chishman and Bruna da Silva present questions to the President of the European Association for Lexicography, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver. In answering, G-M de Schryver calls a spade a spade: No, there is no theory of lexicography, but yes, there is a future for lexicographers. For that future to be bright, lexicographers will have to join hands with the Big Data companies, and accept that their invaluable input will be all but invisible to the users. Artificial Intelligence components will have to be used in earnest, so that ‘searches’ (not look-ups!) will instantly lead to context-sensitive answers. Browsing lexical data only starts from these answers and proceeds from there in two- (and why not three-) dimensional multimedia spaces. To achieve this, G-M de Schryver points to the most promising research ideas at present, as well as the top teams involved in digital dictionary user research.Keywords: EURALEX; eLex; digital lexicography; e-dictionaries; corpora; automation; crowdsourcing; Corpus Query Packages (CQPs); Dictionary Writing Systems (DWSs); artificial intelligence (AI); user-friendliness; mobile devices; augmented writing assistants; eye-tracking; digital user research