Highly Interactive and Natural User Interfaces: Enabling Visual Analysis in Historical Lexicography

Abstract

Information technology, through the advances provided by computational linguistics and related disciplines, has opened the door to previously unthinkable possibilities of study in linguistics. The wealth and diversity of sources that is now available is fundamental to the understanding of language evolution and dictionary-making. However, these advancements are paired with a paradigm shift, in which both the user needs and the modes in which the users interact with technology have changed so much and so rapidly, that modern lexicography would need to resort to a new generation of tools to support its tasks. We present our work developed for the Nuevo Diccionario Histórico del Español (NDHE), in which the challenges of enabling deeper insight and supporting new user's tasks in diachronic linguistics have been approached from a human-computer interaction perspective. Thus, in contrast to what has happened in other disciplines in which visual analytics has focused its efforts since earlier, the analysis tools that are made now in the hands of the experts usually provide a volume of "raw" data so vast, that the data themselves can greatly hinder the work of experts. The linguistics community has already recognized the key importance of user-friendly interfaces. However, neither more powerful tools (in terms of automatic processing) nor user-friendliness alone are sufficient to support typical analytical tasks that take out the most from the multidimensional and ever-growing data stored in corpora and dictionaries. This paper discusses the benefits of producing corpus and dictionary analysis tools that go beyond user-friendliness and presents, interactive visual analysis tools produced for the NDHE and its sources.