Increasing information accessibility on the Web: a rating system for specialized dictionaries
Authors: Valeria Caruso, Anna De Meo, Vincenzo Norman Vitale (Università di Napoli L'Orientale, Università di Napoli Federico II, 2016)
Topic: Latin Resources

Abstract
The paper illustrates the features of the WLR (Web Linguistic Resources) portal, which collects specialized online dictionaries and asses their suitability for different functions using a specifically designed rating system. The contribution aims to demonstrate how the existing tool has improved the usefulness of lexicographical portals and how its effectiveness can be further increased by transforming the portal into a collaborative resource.

Introduction
This paper sketches out the current features and an upcoming new application of a rating system designed to assess online specialized dictionaries. The system evaluative parameters are managed through a relational database accessible for free online at the Web Linguistic Resources (WLR) site. These parameters are used to identify the best available dictionaries to satisfy different types of information needs experienced by the Internet surfers, while the assessment procedure has been designed to be flexible and can be readapted to estimate the supportive value of other resources as well, like grammars or corpora. On the other side, once the score assignment for each dictionary feature has been decided, grades are given automatically by the database. The assessment procedure is straight and strictly operationalized AUTHOR, and it can be used as a guided process to collect data provided by the users themselves. The system is in fact going to be updated and transformed in a collaborative AUTHOR dictionary portal, collecting forms that have been filled in by the Web surfers themselves.

Conclusion
The WLR database has been conceived as a flexible tool that allows its administrators to add or change labels in the three component parts that make up the repository system, which are called ‘categories’, ‘features’ and ‘rating system’. The first component, or ‘category’, lists the types of inventoried linguistic resources: only dictionaries have been assessed so far, but other supportive instruments to solve linguistic issues could be added to the database, like corpora or grammars. To each category the administrator assigns different descriptive features, which is the second component of the rating system, and can be both binary or multivalve. The ‘dictionary’ category has 58 feature (see Caruso, 2014 for a complete list), some of them can only be present or not, thus are binary, like Cultural Notes, others are multivalue and thus need further specifications, like the Kind of Dictionary, which must be set choosing among different choices: Monolingual dictionary, Monolingual word list, Multilingual dictionary, Multilingual word list, Plurilingual dictionary. Lastly, grades are assigned to each of these values according to the methodology described above. The administrator can decide to set different evaluative parameters for each category taken into account: for example, if grammars were added to the repository, the language proficiency level could be a suitable evaluation parameters for it. Once however that the grades distribution has been decided, the database assigns points automatically and independently from any actions performed by the compiler of the evaluation forms, who can set only the values of the different features. Likewise, if the score assignment is changed, the inventoried dictionaries will immediately change their evaluations. The automatization of grades assignment guarantees no errors in the final score computation, however, the selection of values that describe the dictionary features are of crucial relevance for the accuracy of the evaluation. Under this respect, the inventoried resources must be analysed carefully, because most of the times specialized online dictionaries lack strict lexicographical organization and display different data types unsystematically: for example, basic information on the word form might be given exclusively in some of the entries of one dictionary, independently of any significant paradigmatic variation of the language considered. For similar cases, the compiler must set the ‘sometimes’ value in the corresponding feature of the evaluation form, and the record of the data that are sporadically given by the dictionary will make the evaluation procedure more reliable. Actually, the current development of the project is improving the existing database components with an additional part that keeps track of where unsystematic data, like those mentioned above, are present in the dictionary. This addition will make the assessment procedure extremely reliable, since the less evident features can be registered, making the evaluation accuracy easily verifiable. With this new database component, the evaluation forms will be fillable by anyone and the WLR database will become a collaborative portal. This, hopefully, will make the number of the inventoried resources increase, and it will offer other additional developments. While compiling the forms, in fact, users could also contribute to verify the quality of the data provided, signalling for each dictionary feature if any wrong information is given. For each inconsistency the user should indicate one alternative data and the source of information from which this was driven. On the other hand, the database will offer warning signals that indicate the presence of problematic data within one dictionary.