Developing a corpus-based method for extracting French and Albanian polylexical units

How did you learn about the ELEXIS travel grants?

My work actually  focuses on lexicography and corpus linguistics and I am trying to be as up to date as possible.
I am actively visiting different websites that deal with my field of studies on a regular basis. I saw an informative video about the ELEXIS project on Euralex’ website, therefore I visited the ELEXIS’ website where I discovered the announcement about the open call for travel grants.   

Which hosting institution did you apply to?

I chose Det Danske Sprog-og Litteraturselskab (DSL, Denmark) & the University of Copenhagen (UCPH, Denmark) because their work meets the needs of my project, so I figured that I would gain the best expertise and experience in the field of corpus based work there, including all the phases of the work (language resources, corpus compilation, syntax and semantic annotation, etc.)

What is your project about?

My project deals with the creation of a corpus-based method for the extraction of polylexical units (starting with French and Albanian; in due course, we will be able to include other languages).

I decided to work on this project because, as a linguist, professor and translator, I realized that the dictionaries available are not sufficient for our work, especially regarding polylexical units. Additionally, the field of lexicography is not very well developed in my country [i.e. Albania] and there is a huge methodological, quantitative and qualitative gap between the dictionaries we are working with on a daily basis (mono-/bilingual Albanian dictionaries and mono-/bilingual French and English dictionaries).

The goals of my project are:

• to improve the status quo of Albanian corpus-oriented tools and Albanian dictionary-oriented tools in general,
• to design a toolbox for the digitalization of texts (based on the authors’ rights law in Albania);
• to define the extraction process to determine which polylexical units are part of the common and which ones are part of the specialized lexicon: this work will allow an analysis of the treatment of collocations in the respective entries;
• to use French databases (based on the authorization of the respective institutions),
• to provide theoretical and practical results and suggestions.