Keynotes

Ana Salgado

describes herself, quite simply, as a lexicographer. She began her career at Porto Editora, where she worked for several years on major dictionary projects—an experience that shaped the practical and editorial dimension of her work. She is currently President of the Instituto de Lexicologia e Lexicografia da Língua Portuguesa at the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, where she coordinates the *Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa*, the *Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa* and specialised dictionaries. She is also an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto and a researcher at CLUP (Centre for Linguistics of the University of Porto). She holds a PhD in Translation and Terminology (specialisation in Terminology) from NOVA University Lisbon and a degree in Portuguese Studies from the University of Porto. At the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, she leads the project ACL+ – Linguagem, Cultura e Inclusão Digital, funded by La Caixa, which promotes universal access to Portuguese lexicographic resources and strengthens digital inclusion. She collaborates with ISO on lexicographic data modelling, contributes to DARIAH working groups, and co-leads WG1 of ENEOLI, dedicated to developing a multilingual glossary of neology. Her research focuses on lexicography, terminology, digital lexical resources and TEI-based data modelling.

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

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.

The precise date and time of this keynote will be announced soon, this keynote will be streamed.

In the meantime, have a look at the programme overview available here .

Andreas Baumann

is Assistant Professor of Digital Linguistics at the University of Vienna’s Department of German Studies. His academic roles extended to visiting scholar positions at the University of Stellenbosch and the University of Turin, as well as teaching at AMU, Poznań, and serving as a guest researcher at the Austrian Center of Digital Humanities (ÖAW). With a multidisciplinary background in Linguistics, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science, Andreas focuses on modeling language evolution and change. He analyzes dynamical systems to theoretically model the evolution of linguistic elements like words and their semantics, while also empirically studying their dynamics using large-scale historical text corpora and psycholinguistic databases. Andreas has co-led two Digital Humanities projects, one exploring short-term semantic shifts in Austrian German through lexical networks and another one applying dynamic sentiment analysis to Austrian media data, and is currently PI of the project ‘Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity’.

Polysemy: Operationalization, emergence, perception, and the human in the loop

In lexica of natural languages, polysemy is the rule rather than the exception. Understanding why it is so prevalent - given that the presence of multiple senses for a single form, from a purely semiotic point of view, constitutes ambiguity - and how it emerges is central to lexicology. Addressing this question, of course, requires proper operationalization of polysemy in the first place. A robust, straight forward, and commonly used way of measuring the polysemy of a word is simply counting the number of sense entries in a lexicographically curated resource. Such an approach, however, neglects the relative frequencies of a word’s senses as well as how similar senses are to each other. By integrating lexicographic and corpus data, I will discuss frequency and similarity aware measures of polysemy, originating from quantitative ecology (Leinster & Cobbold, 2012, Ecology), and how they relate to ratings of subjectively perceived polysemy, gathered through crowdsourcing efforts. I will then discuss the roles that frequency and acquisition play in the emergence of polysemy (Baumann & Hartmann, 2016, Cognition). Finally, I will zoom in on one specific dimension of meaning: lexical sentiment. I show that variation in human sentiment annotations correlates well with how emotional polysemy is subjectively perceived, but that purely NLP based approaches in fact struggle with appropriately capturing subjective emotional ambiguity. I take this to stress the relevance of ‘the human in the loop’ also in lexical and lexicographic research.

The precise date and time of this keynote will be announced soon, this keynote will be streamed.

In the meantime, have a look at the programme overview available here .

Jan Hajič

Talk title to be announced.

Jan Hajič is a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the School of Computer Science at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

His research interests include fundamental formal linguistic questions, machine translation, deep language understanding, and their applications. He has developed resources with extensive linguistic annotation for numerous languages. He currently leads the nationwide research infrastructure for open language resources in the Czech Republic, LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ, and coordinates two EU projects focused on building large language models: HPLT and OpenEuroLLM.

His professional experience spans both industrial research (IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA) and academic positions (Charles University Prague, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Colorado, USA; Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, among other appointments). He has published more than 200 scholarly works, cited roughly 16,000 times, and serves as chair or member of numerous international and national committees and boards.

Kate Wild

Talk title to be announced.

Kate Wild has been a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary for fifteen years and is now Head of OED Refresh, leading a programme of work to modernize outdated content at scale across the dictionary alongside the entry-by-entry revision project. She is also lead editor of the Historical Thesaurus at the OED, working in close collaboration with the Historical Thesaurus project at the University of Glasgow.

She has previously worked on the Historical Thesaurus project at Glasgow and as a freelance lexicographer for Collins, Lexical Computing, and other organizations. She holds a PhD in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Glasgow. 

Her research interests include thesauri, historical English grammar, and corpus lexicography, and she is actively engaged in questions of how historical lexicography can respond to social, cultural, and technological changes, including AI. 

Robert Lew

is full Professor at the Faculty of English of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and a member of Academia Europaea. His interests centre around dictionary use, and he has been involved in a number of research projects including topics such as access-facilitating devices, definition formats, dictionaries for production, writing assistants, digital dictionary interfaces, training in dictionary skills, and most recently AI in lexicography. He is the Editor of the International Journal of Lexicography(Oxford University Press) and has been on the Board of Euralex since 2016. He has also worked as a practical lexicographer for various publishers, including Harper-Collins, Pearson-Longman, and Cambridge University Press. Picture © Dr. Adrian Wykrota

With bots like these, who needs dictionaries?

Four years after the public launch of ChatGPT, Generative AI has entered many domains, both private and professional, and it is not going away. As anticipated in a prescient presentation at eLex 2019 (The Sintra variations), AI bots have begun to compete with dictionaries as reference tools for language-related tasks. Yet despite the pervasiveness of this emerging technology, dictionaries remain important consultation tools for certain types of language problems, at least for advanced learners, who appear able to choose critically between dictionaries and AI tools depending on the task at hand. At the same time, recent studies comparing the effectiveness of chatbots and dictionaries suggest that AI chatbots are not necessarily more effective than dictionaries—especially bilingual dictionaries—whether measured in terms of immediate success or longer-term learning. Against this empirical backdrop, the talk will sketch the current and near-future roles of dictionaries and AI tools.

The precise date and time of this keynote will be announced soon, this keynote will be streamed.

In the meantime, have a look at the programme overview available here .