MSc in Lexical Computing and Lexicography

Course Structure and Content

The course has three components:

Taught modules

Portfolio

Research project

For full-time students, the taught modules and the portfolio proceed over the first 35 weeks of the year and are followed by a 13-week Research Project. For the MSc, students must complete eight taught modules, a portfolio and a research project.

Taught modules are generally delivered in intensive weeks, preceded by preparatory reading and exercises, and followed by study towards an assessed piece of work. The teaching methods include lectures, student-led seminars, practical workshops, hands-on computing work, literature-based research and guided reading. Two modules are double modules (Lexicography 2 and Lexical Computing 2) where there are two weeks of intensive teaching.

The advantage of the modular structure is that skills and knowledge can be rapidly acquired and applied to assessed tasks. An additional advantage for part-time students is that attendance at the University can be compressed into a single week, making it easier for employers to arrange release.

While research projects, portfolio entries and other assessed work may relate to lexicography for languages other than English, applicants should note that staff are not ordinarily in a position to assess work unless they can reach an opinion on the accuracy of the analysis, with the relevant issues being explained in English.

Timetable for 2002-2003 in html or MS-Word

Taught Modules

There are in all ten taught modules: seven compulsory (of which two are double modules) and three elective (of which students take one). Elective modules will only run if a sufficient number of students choose them.

The taught modules fall into the following four topic areas.

Lexicography

These modules take students through the core elements of lexicography, moving from taxonomising the aspects of the dictionary, through evaluation of entries and dictionaries and the underlying concepts from linguistic theory, to bilingual dictionaries and related aspects of translation theory. Throughout, there is close attention to practical entry-writing, which provides the experience required for the portfolio.

Lexical Computing

These modules develop expertise in the computing and computational linguistics dimension of the course, allowing students to assess the challenges and potential benefits of language technology for lexicography. Students will acquire the mathematical background necessary for statistical language processing and a detailed understanding of lemmatisation, part-of-speech tagging, thesaurus use, word sense disambiguation and parsing. They will be introduced to a wide range of approaches to the lexicon in language technology, including the use of feature structures and WordNets. Some programming will be taught, with all students learning how to produce statistical summaries of corpus data. In the elective LCM06 (for students with good programming skills) students will produce more advanced summaries of word behaviour suitable for use in a contemporary lexicography project.

Dictionary Project Management

Students learn how to plan, schedule and budget for a dictionary project; development of the user profile and style guide; marketing; strategies for gathering corpus material; staff team management and training; monitoring workloads and progress; quality assurance; the various phases of editing; proofreading and the physical dictionary production process. Students will also be introduced to the areas of law of particular pertinence to lexical resource development, which are intellectual property, data protection and privacy, defamation and libel, all with reference to digital as well as print media.

Corpus Use

The use of a corpus is fundamental to the course's approach to lexicography. In LCM07, students learn how corpora have been designed and gathered, including the core issue of how efforts have been made to make them "representative" of a language variety. Students will also gain extensive experience of using corpora, with a range of software interfaces.

LCM12 is an elective module for people whose interests include language teaching. Students will learn a range of methods for bringing corpus data into the classroom and will have an opportunity to use various pieces of corpus-language-teaching software.

Portfolio

The development of the portfolio starts when the student registers, and continues alongside the taught modules to its submission point prior to the beginning of the project. It is assumed that of a typical 40 hour study week, 33 hours should be dedicated to the taught module and 7 hours to the portfolio. The portfolio consists of lexical entries for a range of words, for a range of dictionary types, written by the student in the course of their enrolment. The entries should display use of the corpus and other techniques the student has been learning.

Research Project

The research project gives students substantial experience of synthesizing material drawn from the taught modules, and developing their own critical perspective from an in-depth study of some lexicographic or lexical computing issue. It accounts for one-third of the course. Full-time students will work on the planning and preparation of the project over the second semester, and will undertake the project full-time, July - September. For students in relevant employment, the project may be undertaken as part of their job, provided that it is shown to meet the criteria of requiring substantial independent research and independent working. There will be a seminar attached to several of the teaching weeks throughout the year on research methods and research project planning.