Innovative lexicography: new products and methods in the generative AI age

This paper revolves around the interaction of lexicography with generative AI. It defends that this interaction may be very positive for our independent science if we follow three basic principles of this interaction. Firstly, lexicographers must be always on a “learning mode”, i.e. ready to learn how they can extract adequate lexicographic data with generative AI chatbots, e.g. by learning to make adequate prompts with the chatbots. Secondly, lexicographers must always have the last word, they must validate the data AI chatbots generate. Finally, lexicographers must work in cooperation with AI developers, e.g. devising special types of parallel corpora that can be used for training language models that will offer short and long explanations in the form of glosses of, say, grammar rules, meaning explanations, and so on. We illustrate how this interaction currently works in two projects that offer a way forward for the future of the theory and practice of lexicography: the Diccionario Digital del Español (DIDES), and a generative AI model that is being created for producing glosses that will be working in a writing assistant that aims at meeting some of the language needs of Spanish learners, e.g. explaining some of the rules that may have been violated.