Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins (née Sinclair; 23 January 1931 — 3 September 2021) was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
[2] In 1987, Atkins met Charles J. Fillmore, whose Frame Semantics approach to the lexicon provided the solutions to many of her lexicographic problems.
Their subsequent discussions and collaborations resulted in the development of the FrameNet project at the International Computer Science Institute, University of California, Berkeley, to which Atkins became Lexicographic Adviser.
[3] She was a member of the Advisory Board of the American National Corpus,[4] and the International Journal of Lexicography.
[6][7] In 1997 and 1998, Atkins, together with Michael Rundell, planned and presented two week-long workshops in South Africa, for linguists and lexicographers from the eleven language communities.
[8] Subsequently, Atkins and Rundell founded the Lexicography MasterClass,[9] providing advice, consultancy services, and training for anyone involved in, or embarking on, a lexicographic project.
Their other main project was the planning, design, corpora-building, lexicographer-training, and production of the Dante database.
[11] This analysis of modern English was commissioned by Foras na Gaelige for use as the basis of their New English-Irish Dictionary, and was made available to scholars world-wide.
Her principal interests included the lexical analysis of corpus data, and in particular the use of linguistic theory as a basis for a systematic description of the language; designing databases to store lexicographic data for use by human lexicographers and computer lexicons; using such databases in the creation of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries; the training of lexicographers; and the study of how people actually use dictionaries.
She moved to Sussex in the 1970s with her husband, Peter Atkins, and had three children, including Lucy (a novelist).
[15] Among her honours are an honorary DLitt from the University of Brighton (2000), UK, for services to lexicography and linguistics;[16] a festschrift (2002) published by EURALEX[17] at the occasion of her 70th birthday to mark her contribution to international lexicography, and an honorary DLitt by the University of Pretoria (2008) for significant contributions to the development of lexicographic practices worldwide and in particular for the African languages in South Africa.
[18] She was also past president and honorary life member of the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX).
In: Advances in Lexicology: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New OED, 45–63, Waterloo, Canada.
29-43 1987: "Semantic-ID tags: corpus evidence for dictionary senses", in The Uses of Large Text Databases, proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the New OED Centre, University of Waterloo, Canada.
1988: (with J. Kegl & B. Levin) "Anatomy of a verb entry: from linguistic theory to lexicographic practice".
Also in Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker, Linguistica Computazionale IX-X.
In: Information in Text, Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference of the New OED Centre, University of Waterloo, Canada.
1990: (with F. E. Knowles) "Interim report on the EURALEX / AILA Research Project into Dictionary Use", in T. Magay & J. Zigany (eds) Proceedings of BudaLex '88, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest.
37–7 1992: "Putting lexicography on the professional map", Proceedings of EURALEX '90, M. Alvar Ezquerra (ed.
1994: (with Charles J. Fillmore) "Starting where the dictionaries stop: the challenge of corpus lexicography".
Presentation and on-line demonstration at the Xerox-Acquilex Symposium on the Dictionary of the Future, Uriage, France.
1995: (with Charles J. Fillmore and Ulrich Heid) "Lexicographical Relevance in Corpus Evidence", Deliverable D-IX-2 of DELIS Project (LRE 61.034).
1996: (with Beth Levin and Grace Song) "Making Sense of Corpus Data: A Case Study".
1997: (with Beth Levin and Grace Song) "Making Sense of Corpus Data: A Case Study of Verbs of Sound".
In Polysemy: Linguistic and Computational Approaches, (eds) Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock.
2002: (with Nuria Bel, Francesca Bertagna, Pierrette Bouillon, Nicoletta Calzolari, Christiane Fellbaum, Ralph Grishman, Alessandro Lenci, Catherine MacLeod, Martha Palmer, Gregor Thurmair, Marta Villegas, Antonio Zampolli) "From Resources to Applications.
2006: (with Valerie Grundy) "Lexicographic profiling: An aid to consistency in dictionary entry design".
R. H. Gouws, U. Heid, W. Schweickard & H. E. Wiegand (forthcoming from Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin).
R. H. Gouws, U. Heid, W. Schweickard & H. E. Wiegand (forthcoming from Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin).