Wiktionnaire:Actualités/057-décembre-2019/en

Wiktionnaire:Actualités is a monthly periodical about French Wiktionary, dictionaries and words, published online since April 2015. Everyone is welcome to contribute to it. You can sign in to be noticed of future issues, read old issues and participate to the draft of the next edition. You can also have a look at Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia. If you have any comments, critics or suggestions, our talk page is open!

This article reflects upon possibilities to enhance tools to find the word "on the tip of the tongue". Dictionaries are useful to understand a word encountered while reading or listening, but when one is speaking or writing, how can a defect in memory access be solved. Words in one's mind are described as a mental dictionary, but is it really a dictionary ? This article starts with an introduction to different models for memory access described in psycholinguistics, and analyse their usefulness to improve word recovery. The direct search solution does not seem the most powerful, as it is difficult to jump from idea to word and besides search function in the brain does not work this way. The second strategy considered is reaching the researched word using linked words, with a graph network. Authors use WordNet and DBpedia to build a search engine suggesting linked words through multiple types of relation. However the nature of relations between words is insufficiently defined for the tool to be efficient presently. This approach, very different from CamemBERT approach presented last month in Actualités, is based on a preliminary work of networking, with different types of relations, some of which have been proposed in the Wiktionary, such as relation of synonymy, antonymy, metonymy, etc. Other links between word are constructed by the human brain, including sound confusions, which cannot be all detailed in a dictionary. Enrichment of the Wiktionary could however lead to an improvement to this type of tool by constituting a semantic network of words, and not only of concepts like DBpedia. It is either way an additional motivation to enrich Wiktionary pages with more links to other words. Let's congratulate Alphabeta whose contribution this year consisted of adding numerous links to derived words! — a column by Noé