ABSTRACT
According to De Schryver (2003: 146), electronic dictionaries targeted at humans are “collections of structured electronic data that can be accessed with multiple tools, enhanced with a wide range of functionalities, and used in various environments”. Electronic dictionaries do not have to be used by humans only; they can also be read by machines, mainly computers. Machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs) have a great potential for being used in linguistic research. They are relied on in natural language processing, which benefits machine translation and has its applications in systems that automatically summarize texts or extract specific bits of information (Zaenen 2002: 240). It is however human-oriented electronic dictionaries that are the main focus of this chapter (see Chapter 12 of this Handbook for an in-depth analysis of lexicography and natural language processing).
