DANTE - A lexical database for English

Dante is a lexical database for English. It provides a fine-grained and comprehensive record of the behaviour of over 42,000 headwords and 23,000 multiword expressions, and includes over 27,000 idioms and phrases.

Dante is the product of a three-year lexicographic project, in which the core vocabulary of English was analysed from scratch, using a custom-built corpus of 1.7 billion words. It is a unique resource, providing a systematic description of the meanings, grammatical and collocational behaviour, and text-type characteristics of English words. Linguistic facts, drawn from the corpus, are recorded in over 40 datatypes, all machine-searchable. Every one of these is linked to a specific sense of the headword and supported by two or more unedited corpus examples.

Dante was designed by Sue Atkins, Adam Kilgarriff and Michael Rundell who led a team of 20 highly skilled lexicographers. The database was commissioned by Foras na Gaeilge who as the sole copyright holder released Dante in 2024 under the CC-BY license.

Publications

@inproceedings{jakubicek2024,
  title={DANTE resurrected},
  author={Jakubíček, Miloš and Rundell, Michael and Breathnach, Cormac and Ó Mianáin, Pádraig},
  booktitle={Book of Abstracts of the XXI EURALEX International Conference},
  pages={102--104},
  year={2024}
}

@inproceedings{convery2010dante,
  title={The DANTE Database (Database of ANalysed Texts of English)},
  author={Convery, Cathal and Mian{\'a}in, P{\'a}draig {\'O} and Raghallaigh, Muiris {\'O} and Atkins, Sue and Kilgarriff, Adam and Rundell, Michael},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the XIV EURALEX International Conference},
  pages={293--5},
  year={2010}
}

@inproceedings{atkins2010database,
  title={Database of ANalysed Texts of English (DANTE): the NEID database project},
  author={Atkins, BT Sue and Kilgarriff, Adam and Rundell, Michael},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the XIV Euralex International Congress},
  pages={549--556},
  year={2010}
}

@article{rundell2011dante,
  title={The DANTE database: A user guide},
  author={Rundell, Michael and Atkins, Sue},
  journal={Proceedings of eLex},
  pages={233--246},
  year={2011},
  publisher={Citeseer}
}