Dictionaries Revisited

Dictionaries are probably the most well studied class of data structures. A dictionary supports insertions, deletions, membership queries, and usually successor, predecessor, and extract-min. Given their centrality to both the theory and practice of data structures, surprisingly basic questions about them remain unsolved and sometimes even unposed. This talk focuses on questions that arise from the disparity between the way large-scale dictionaries are analyzed and the way they are used in practice

Introspective data and corpus data : combination instead of confrontation in the study of German metaphorical idioms of life

This paper examines the applicability of the combination of data types in a study of German idioms of life with the tools of cognitive metaphor theory. The data sources for conceptual metaphors were mainly metaphors found in the relevant literature. These metaphors are of introspective nature to a great extent. The primary data sources for metaphorical expressions were dictionaries that represent introspective data, too. These data have been complemented by corpus data. The paper discusses the problems of introspective and corpus data raised by the study of German idioms of life. Two case studies demonstrate the advantages of the combination of data and methods

Pushing back the origin of Bantu lexicography: the vocabularium congense of 1652, 1928, 2012

In this article, the oldest Bantu dictionary hitherto known is explored, that is the Vocabularium Latinum, Hispanicum, e Congense, handed down to us through a manuscript from 1652 by the Flemish Capuchin Joris van Gheel, missionary in the Kongo (present-day north-western Angola and the southern part of the Lower Congo Province of the DRC). The manuscript was heavily reworked by the Belgian Jesuits Joseph van Wing and Constant Penders, and published in 1928. Both works are currently being digitized, linked and added to an interlingual and multimedia database that revolves around Kikongo and the early history of the Kongo kingdom. In Sections 1 and 2 the origins of Bantu lexicography in general and of Kikongo metalexicography in particular are revisited. Sections 3 and 4 are devoted to a study of Van Cheers manuscript and an analysis of Van Wing and Fenders rework. In Sections 5 and 6 translation equivalence and lexicographical structure in both dictionaries are scrutinized and compared. In Section 7, finally, all the material is brought together

Websterian High-Scoring Scrabble

The article High-Scoring Scrabble Revisited in the May 1981 Word Ways presented a set of rules for determining in a SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game what words are to be allowed. Applying these rules, a single Scrabble move of 1757 points was devised, based on words in Webster\u27s New International Dictionary, Second Edition. The article further stated that it would be an excellent idea to find the highest scores for the entire range of Merriam-Webster dictionaries to show their variation with dictionary size

The demands of users and the publishing world: printed or online, free or paid for?

International audienc

The Role of Definitions in Biomedical Concept Representation

The Foundational Model (FM) of anatomy, developed as an anatomical enhancement of UMLS, classifies anatomical entities in a structural context. Explicit definitions have played a critical role in the establishment of FM classes. Essential structural properties that distinguish a group of anatomical entities serve as the differentiae for defining classes. These, as well as other structural attributes, are introduced as template slots in Protege, a frame-based knowledge acquisition system, and are inherited by descendants of the class. A set of desiderata has evolved during the instantiation of the FM for formulating definitions. We contend that 1. these desiderata generalize to non-anatomical domains and 2. satisfying them in constituent vocabularies of UMLS would enhance the quality of information retrievable through UMLS

Sparse Image Representation with Epitomes

Sparse coding, which is the decomposition of a vector using only a few basis elements, is widely used in machine learning and image processing. The basis set, also called dictionary, is learned to adapt to specific data. This approach has proven to be very effective in many image processing tasks. Traditionally, the dictionary is an unstructured "flat" set of atoms. In this paper, we study structured dictionaries which are obtained from an epitome, or a set of epitomes. The epitome is itself a small image, and the atoms are all the patches of a chosen size inside this image. This considerably reduces the number of parameters to learn and provides sparse image decompositions with shiftinvariance properties. We propose a new formulation and an algorithm for learning the structured dictionaries associated with epitomes, and illustrate their use in image denoising tasks.Comment: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Colorado Springs : United States (2011

Parallel dictionaries with local rules on AVL and brother trees

We present a set of local rules to deal with dictionaries, having as a main advantage their possible scheduling in a highly synchronized way to get parallel dictionaries on AVLs. Up to now trees used in massively parallel dictionaries needed to have all the leaves at the same depth, such as 2--3 trees. Therefore, it was possible (in insertions and deletions) to reconstruct the tree bottom-up in a very regular fashion, as a pipeline of plane waves moving up. On AVL trees the situation looks different because leaves can have different depth, therefore any wave in a pipeline is highly irregular. To solve this problem we define {\it virtual} plane waves allowing us to develop an EREW dictionary for $k$ keys with $k$ processors and time $O (\log n + \log k)$. Later on we generalize the sePostprint (published version