Computational Lexicon

A Computational Lexicon is a lexicon that is a computational resource designed for automated processing of lexical items.

• AKA: Machine-Readable Lexicon, Digital Lexicon, Lexical Database, Computational Dictionary.
• Context:
  • It can typically encode Lexical Entries with structured information about words and phrases.
  • It can typically support Natural Language Processing Tasks through lexical lookup and semantic information.
  • It can typically maintain Syntactic Information including part-of-speech tags and subcategorization frames.
  • It can typically provide Morphological Information for word form generation and lemmatization.
  • It can typically store Semantic Relations between lexical items such as synonyms and hypernyms.
  • ...
  • It can often include Phonological Information for speech processing applications.
  • It can often contain Domain-Specific Terms for specialized fields.
  • It can often support Cross-Lingual Mappings for translation tasks.
  • It can often integrate Frequency Information from corpus analysis.
  • ...
  • It can range from being a Simple Computational Lexicon to being a Complex Computational Lexicon, depending on its information richness.
  • It can range from being a General Computational Lexicon to being a Domain-Specific Computational Lexicon, depending on its coverage scope.
  • It can range from being a Static Computational Lexicon to being a Dynamic Computational Lexicon, depending on its update mechanism.
  • It can range from being a Monolingual Computational Lexicon to being a Multilingual Computational Lexicon, depending on its language coverage.
  • ...
  • It can integrate with Natural Language Processing Systems for text analysis.
  • It can connect to Knowledge Base Systems for concept mapping.
  • It can interface with Machine Translation Systems for lexical transfer.
  • It can communicate with Information Extraction Systems for entity recognition.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • WordNet, containing synsets and semantic relations for English words.
  • FrameNet, encoding semantic frames and lexical units.
  • VerbNet, classifying English verbs by syntactic behavior.
  • Domain-Specific Computational Lexicons:
    • Medical Computational Lexicon with clinical terms
    • Legal Computational Lexicon with legal terminology
    • Technical Computational Lexicon with engineering terms
  • Term Role Lexicon, mapping terms to syntactic roles in concept names.
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Printed Dictionary, which lacks computational structure.
  • Word List, which lacks linguistic annotation.
  • Corpus, which contains texts rather than lexical entries.
• See: Lexicon, Lexical Database, Semantic Lexical Database, Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Knowledge Base, Ontology.

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