The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) was primarily based on data from the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). However, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) continues to be revised, adding new words, senses, and phrases. These additions need to be linked to HTOED for two reasons. To present a complete semantic history of the language and enable HTOED to fully support a wide range of linguistic and historical research.
Consequently, over the past few years, as part of the OED100 project, OED has been working on expanding HTOED using a partially automated process. A tool automatically identifies possible classifications of senses (based on features such as definition wording, cross-references, and labels). Subsequently, a team of editors manually checks and modifies the suggested classifications.
OED has linked more than 55,000 OED senses to HTOED categories through this project. OED is also improving the coverage of English in earlier periods by adding links to older senses, which were not covered in the OED or linked to the HTOED. The next stage of the OED100 project will be to update HTOED’s taxonomy to enable a more comprehensive coverage of these and other semantic fields.
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