Oxford English Dictionary Introduces AI Quotations Finder for Enhanced Research
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has launched an AI Quotations Finder, a new tool designed to assist researchers in finding additional usage evidence for specific OED senses. This tool does not generate AI-created quotations but rather retrieves historical examples of words from a source corpus, specifically EarlyPrint 1473-1800. It works by searching for a headword in the corpus, returning a thousand concordance lines, and then using AI to identify which of these examples match a particular OED sense. The AI further assesses the ten most relevant concordances to present 'candidate quotations.' This process typically takes around 50 seconds. The OED emphasizes that these candidate quotations are verbatim from the source corpus and are not AI-generated or hallucinated. While OED editors were involved in the tool's design and testing, the candidate quotations and their bibliographic metadata have not been verified by them and may not always accurately reflect the OED definition.
