The Bulgarian Nnational Corpus and its Application in Bulgarian Academic Lexicography
The Bulgarian Nnational Corpus and its Application in Bulgarian Academic Lexicography

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents applications of the Bulgarian National Corpus (BulNC) in Bulgarian Academic Lexicography. The BulNC is the largest, representative Bulgarian corpus, which is intended to reflect the Bulgarian language up from the 1950s till the present day. The BulNC, which contains 400 million words, is fully morpho-syntactically and partially semantically annotated. It constitutes a modern resource for compiling various types of dictionaries. The BulNC is applied in the compilation of the multi-volume academic Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language (DBL), which aims at presenting the Bulgarian vocabulary of the last 200 years. The DBL will consist of around 20 volumes and it will include 160,000 entries. The application of a corpus tool leads to certain changes and improvements in the dictionary-making process which concern chiefly the macro- and microstructure of the DBL. The corpus helps to create lists of words to be included in the DBL, enables the lexicographers to automatically extract collocations, facilitates the acquisition of lexicographically relevant information when defining particular lexical items, as well as optimizes the selection of descriptive material. A corpus-based approach complements the traditional lexicographic methods. It provides us with new prospects for the optimization of lexicographic work, as well as ensures greater objectivity of lexicographic decisions, thus considerably improving the quality of the end product.

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