29 September 2026 to 3 October 2026
OeAW Main Seat
Europe/Vienna timezone

Dictionaries as Pipelines: Lexicographic Work at the Lisbon Academy of Sciences

2 Oct 2026, 11:30
1h
01 | Festsaal (Festive Hall), OeAW Main Seat, 1st floor

01 | Festsaal (Festive Hall), OeAW Main Seat, 1st floor

Austrian Academy of Sciences Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2 1010 Vienna

Speaker

Ana Salgado (FLUP – University of Porto)

Description

This keynote reframes dictionary-making as the design of a living, governed pipeline: a system that turns linguistic evidence into publishable lexical knowledge while keeping editorial decisions traceable and revisable. Drawing on current work at the Lisbon Academy of Sciences across a portfolio of initiatives, it shows how this pipeline supports complementary goals: a continuously updated Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa (DLP), inclusive and participatory lexicographic practices (ACL+), a collaborative lexicographic platform mapping variation across the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) via the Atlas Lexicográfico da Língua Portuguesa (ALLP), and the reuse of lexical data in infrastructures and language technologies (PORTULAN).

The pipeline starts by converting legacy materials into structured, machine-actionable data (such as XML) and by applying consistent normalisation and TEI-based annotation. Evidence is then continuously gathered from corpora, query logs, and community contributions, and assessed through a combination of quantitative signals and expert editorial judgement. A central theme is governance: how inclusion and revision decisions are documented, reviewed, and made auditable—especially when balancing pluricentric Portuguese.

Extending the pipeline from dictionary entries to atlas-style knowledge, ALLP illustrates how lexical description can also support cartography of variation, combining curated entries with usage evidence and, where relevant, multimedia documentation. The keynote concludes with practical lessons—what scales well, what slows teams down, and how to monitor quality over time.

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