2004 OntologyAndTheLexicon

• (Hirst, 2004) ⇒ Graeme Hirst. (2004). “Ontology and the Lexicon.” In: Steffen Staab, and Rudi Studer (Eds.). “Handbook on Ontologies." Springer. ISBN:3540408347

Subject Headings: Ontology, Lexicon, Linguistically Grounded Ontology.

Notes

• Related to (Huang et al., 2010).

Quotes

Summary

A lexicon is a linguistic object and hence is not the same thing as an ontology, which is non-linguistic. Nonetheless, word senses are in many ways similar to ontological concepts and the relationships found between word senses resemble the relationships found between concepts. Although the arbitrary and semi-arbitrary distinctions made by natural languages limit the degree to which these similarities can be exploited, a lexicon can nonetheless serve in the development of an ontology, especially in a technical domain.

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2 Lexical entries

2.1 What’s in a lexical entry?

Any detail of the linguistic behaviour or use of a word may be included in its lexical entry: its phonetics (including pronunciations, syllabification, and stress pattern), written forms (including hyphenation points), morphology (including inflections and other affixation), syntactic and combinatory behaviour, constraints on its use, its relative frequency, and, of course, all aspects of its meaning. For our purposes in this chapter, the word’s semantic properties, including relationships between the meanings of the word and those of other words, are the most important, and we will look at them in detail in section 3.2 below.

Thus, as mentioned earlier, a lexical entry is potentially quite a large record. For example, the CELEX lexicons of English, Dutch, and German (Baayen, Piepenbrock, and van Rijn 1993) are represented as databases whose records have 950 fields. Andin an explanatory combinatorial dictionary (ECD) (e.g.,Melcuk 1984, Melcuk and Zholkovsky 1988), which attempts to explicate literally every aspect of the knowledge that a speaker needs to have in order to use a word correctly, lexical entries can run to many pages. For example, Steele’s (1990) ECD-style entry for eight senses of hope (noun and verb) is 28 book-sized pages long, much of which is devoted to the combinatory properties of the word — for example, the noun hope permits flicker of to denote a small amount (whereas expectation, in contrast, does not).

Many linguistic applications will require only a subset of the information that may be found in the lexical entries of large, broad-coverage lexicons. Because of their emphasis on detailed knowledge about the linguistic behaviour of words, these large, complex lexicons are sometimes referred to as lexical knowledge bases , or LKBs . Some researchers distinguish LKBs from lexicons by regarding LKBs as the larger and more-abstract source from which instances of lexicons for particular applications may be generated. In the present chapter, we will not need to make this distinction, and will just use the term lexicon.

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2004 OntologyAndTheLexicon	Graeme Hirst			Ontology and the Lexicon.		Steffen Staab	http://www.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Hirst-Ontol-2009.pdf			2004