The Sketch Engine

The chapter deals with word sketches - one-page automatic, corpus-based summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour.  They were first used in the production of the Macmillan English Dictionary and were presented at Euralex 2002.  At that point, they only existed for English.  Now, we have developed the Sketch Engine, a corpus tool which takes as input a corpus of any language and a corresponding grammar patterns and which generates word sketches for the words of that language.  It also generates a thesaurus and 'sketch differences', which specify similarities and differences between near-synonyms. We briefly present a case study investigating applicability of the Sketch Engine to free word-order languages. The results show that word sketches could facilitate lexicographic work in Czech as they have for English.