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CV/Resume of Orin Hargraves

Orin Hargraves           (410) 346-6025           email: orinhargraves at gmail dot com
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 Terms of Engagement
I work primarily as a lexicographer and language researcher for numerous US, UK, and European research organizations, publishers, and other concerns. My chief area of concentration is the English language, with expert knowledge of semantics, grammar, and dialectal differences between British and American. Most projects I am involved in result in the publication of reference books, webpages, and software (primarily dictionaries), ontologies, and in the production of successively refined inputs to natural language processing (NLP) systems. If you prefer a more graphic presentation of my experience and capabilities, please visit my webpage at PublishersMarketplace.com, on the link above. Please  I am working half-time at CLEAR, a division of the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU Boulder from September 2012 to May 2013. During this period my time for other consulting gigs will be limited.

 Skill Set
lexicography ● teaching and training in any of the fields noted herein ● annotation and adjudication for NLP research, training data, WSD ● ontology development for data mining, keyword extraction, Q&A, summarization, WSD, event detection ●reference writing and editing (specializing in language reference and encyclopedias)  ● editorial management for reference and dictionary projects ● expert in British and American English differences  ● English language localization for British English and American English ●software: MS Office, XMetaL, PubMan, DPS (IDM’s Dictionary Production System)● languages: conversant in Moroccan Arabic, working knowledge of French, German, classical Greek ● My Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is INFJ. 

Client List
  • USA: BearingPoint, Berlitz, Butler Hill Group, Cambridge University Press, CL Research, Cengage Learning, Facts on File, Heinle Thomson, Idea.org, K12.com, Merriam-Webster, Microsoft Corporation, National Museum of Language, Oxford University Press, Potomac Global Media, Scholastic, TunedIn Software, VisualThesaurus.com

    , Vocabulary.com, WordReference.com

  • UK: Addison-Wesley-Longman, Bloomsbury, Chambers-Harrap, Continuum Books, HarperCollins, Macmillan Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, Toucan Books

  • Other abroad: Langenscheidt KG (Munich), Linguistic Computing Laboratory (Rome), Marshall Cavendish International (Singapore), QBS Learning (New Delhi)     
Books

(forthcoming) It's Been Said Before: a guide to the use and abuse of verbal cliches (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Slang Rules!, an ESL self-study book (Merriam-Webster, 2008)

The Big Book of Spelling Tests (Black Dog Leventhal, 2007)

Spell It!, the study guide for the National Spelling Bee (Scripps Newspapers, 2006 – 2010)

New Words (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Mighty Fine Words and Smashing Expressions, a reference book about British and American English differences (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Chicago At Your Door, a guide for settlers (Times Editions Pte Ltd 1999)

London At Your Door (Kuperard, 1997)

Culture Shock! Morocco, a guide to customs and etiquette for foreigners in Morocco (Graphic Arts Center, 1995)

Articles, Papers, Presentations

  • Instructor in Lexicography at the LSA Summer Institute, University of Colorado, 2011
  • "Emerging American Language in 1812," National Museum of Language, College Park, MD, 2010
  • Review of The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography by B.T. Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell, in Dictionaries 2009
  • “Lumping, Splitting, and Natural Language Processing” 2009 , Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA), Indiana University
  • "Coarse-grained English All-Words Task" in Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations, 2007 (with Ken Litkowski and Roberto Navigli)
  • "Word-Sense Disambiguation of Prepositions" in Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations" (SemEval-2007; with Ken Litkowski)
  • “Americanization and its Mal-contents” DSNA, 2007, University of Chicago
  • "Coverage and Inheritance in the Preposition Project" in Proceedings of the Third ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions, European Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006 (with Ken Litkowski)
  • "Characterizing Prepositions for Natural Language Processing” 2005, DSNA, Boston University
  • “Who Owns English?” 2005, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 
  • “Cucurbits,” English Today, October 2004 
  • "Long Distance Lexicography: a View from the Field, Dictionaries 2004 
  • “Long-Distance Lexicography: a View from the Field” 2003, DSNA, Duke University 
  • “Who Owns English?”, Vocabula Review, June 2003 
  • Various articles in Verbatim, the Language Quarterly, Spring 2002 – 2005 (available via Amazon).

Lexicography, Lexical Research, NLP

  • Research consultant at the Institute of Cognitive Science, CU-Boulder, starting September 2012

  • Sense clustering of the 800 most polysemous words in WordNet for Vocabulary.com (2011)

  • Development of an ontology for real-time Q&A and product delivery in the hospitality industry (2011)

  • American English Consultant for Collins CoBuild English Grammar, 3rd edition (2011)

  • Consultant lexicographer for the National Museum of Language exhibit "Emerging American Language in 1812" (2009-10)

  • Consultant lexicographer for the Scholastic Children’s Dictionary new edition (2010)

  • Defining for the HarperCollins Framework multilingual translation database (for completion in 2010)

  • Sense inventory expansion and rationalization for a major new bilingual dictionary for publication in 2009

  • Sense inventory mapping (WordNet ￫ British National Corpus) on N-N, N-V, and V-N collocations for the Linguistic Computing Laboratory (2007)

  • Sense inventory mapping (WordNet ￫ Oxford Dictionary of English) in preparation for SemEval 2007 (2007)

  • Lexical analysis of corpora, textual data, and word lists for Microsoft’s NLP group (via their vendor Butler Hill Group; 2003 – present)

  • Principal lexicographic researcher for the Preposition Project (2005 – 2008), analyzing and classifying the behavior of all prepositions in Framenet.

  • Briticization of the Berlitz English Pronunciation Program CD (2006)

  • 2006 update of Words to Rhyme With by Willard Espy.

  • US English consultant for Collins-Cobuild English Usage (HarperCollins UK, 2004)

  • US English consultant for the Oxford Dictionary of English (2003) and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition (2004)

  • Editor for the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms (2003)

  • American English editor for Langenscheidt’s Großwörterbuch Muret-Sanders Deutsch-Englisch (2003)

  • Contributing Editor for the Oxford Essential Business and Office Dictionary (2002) 

  • Editor for the Oxford American College Dictionary (2002) 

  • Editor for the Macmillan English Dictionary (2002) 

  • Contributing editor to the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001, 2004, 2010), the Oxford Essential Dictionary of the US Military (2001), and the Oxford Dictionary of Difficult Words (2001) 

  • Americanization and expansion of entries for the Microsoft Encarta Thesaurus (2001) 

  • Lexicographer for the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999) 

  • Contributing editor to the Cambridge Dictionary of American English (1997, 2008) 

  • New defining and editing of Longman Interactive American Dictionary CD-ROM (1997) 

  • Americanization of the Longman Handy Learner’s Dictionary (1993) 

  • Lexicographer for the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1992)

Other Writing and Editing

  • Blogger for the Macmillan Dictionary Blog (2011)

  • Author of the monthly "Language Lounge" column and of Word of the Day at VisualThesaurus.com (ongoing)

  •  Book Review Editor of Dictionaries, the journal of the Dictionary Society of North America (2006 – 2010)

  • Writing and compilation from existing material of a vocabulary builder and a grammar toolkit for St. Martin’s Press (2005)

  • Writing and editing of encyclopedia articles for the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia (2002; subjects: botany, computers, food, languages, the Middle East, religion)

  • Copyediting of several privately published texts on Theravada Buddhism (1986 – 1992)

  •  Writing of intermediate and advanced EFL texts for Moroccan secondary schools (1980s)


    Education

BA with honors, General Studies in the Humanities, the University of Chicago, 1977


Associations and Memberships


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