Neoveille, système de repérage et de suivi des néologismes en sept langues

Language dictionaries describe lexical units and their meanings, but this vocabulary and usage changes over time. This is obvious on the historical scale but it also holds for short diachrony. Around 10% of words in a general text are ‘unknown’ (Renouf 2014). Many of these words are proper names, hapaxes or typos, but there are also neologisms, understood as novel meanings for known forms or new forms. The proportion of semantic neologisms, that is for existing words that acquire a new meaning, is rather more difficult to ascertain. Neology, the study of these changes—aims at accounting for these new forms and meanings, and is essential, not only for general but also for applied linguistics: updating language dictionaries, lexical resources in natural language processing for example. This article presents Neoveille, a collaborative international project financed by the University Sorbonne-Paris-Cité. First, there is a brief presentation of the state of the art in neology in linguistics and automatic language processing, then an exhaustive review of the components of the Neoveille platform, to finish up with a summary of the present status and preliminary results for French.