Dictionaries in the cloud. State of the art, trends and challenges

Two emerging phenomena of the internet, crowdsourcing, the exploitation of a community/group of people to perform tasks normally performed by employees and cloud computing, which allows users ubiquitous access to services and online tools for translation and multilingual digital content, have been widely adopted in the field of Machine Translation and Computer Aided Translation and are radically changing the scenario also in the creation, maintenance and sharing of lexical and terminological resources. The new paradigm in this field is collaborative lexicography/terminography, in which users are encouraged to contribute. Thanks to this new approach, characterised by large-scale collaboration fostered by cloud-computing, huge lexical and terminological resources have been compiled and are continually updated by the users. One of the most significant examples of collaboratively created dictionaries is Wiktionary, an open source collaboration platform to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary, but lexica and terminological bases are ever more frequently being developed by means of the collaborative effort of a “crowd” of volunteers. This paper aims to outline the state of the art of this emerging phenomenon of the Web. The first section of the paper outlines the use of crowdsourcing and cloud computing technologies in collaborative practices for the development of lexical and terminological resources. The second section describes the different models of user contribution to the development and maintenance of these resources on the Web, and finally the last section presents some concluding remarks about the use of crowdsourcing in dictionary compilation.