Hector: Connecting Words with Definitions

Abstract

Hector is a feasibility study on high-tech corpus lexicography. Oxford University Press provided the lexicographers and a corpus of 20 million words of running English text; Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center provided the high tech tools to enable the lexicographers to do all of their work on-line.

The tools provide the ability to query the corpus in various ways and see the resulting matches, to write and edit dictionary entries, and to link each occurrence of a word in the corpus with its sense as displayed in the entry editor. Additional support tools give statistical information about words in the corpus, derivatives and related words, syntactic structures, collocates, and case-variants.

This report describes the tools and the status of the project as of July, 1992.