Orð og tunga - 01.06.2012, Page 13

Matiheiv Whelpton: From human-oriented dictionaries
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2 Wordnet
2.1 Background
The Princeton WordNet1 (Miller 1995, Fellbaum 1998) is a lexical data-
base of English constructed to represent word sense relations. It was
developed under the direction of the psychologist, George Miller,
and its original aims were explicitly psycholinguistic in nature. As
Miller (1998a: xv) explains, the original WordNet project included
two psycholinguistic hypotheses: (i) the separability hypothesis "that
the lexical component of language can be isolated and studied in its
own right", i.e. that the mental lexicon has a distinct organisation and
identity from the combinatorial systems of grammar and the expres-
sive system of phonology; (ii) the patterning hypothesis "that people
could not master and have readily available all the lexical knowledge
needed to use a natural language unless they could take advantage
of systematic patterns and relations among the meanings that words
can be used to express". The WordNet project was always, however,
a project in computational psycholinguistics and another important
hypothesis is related to the issue of computational tractability and
scalability: the comprehensiveness hypothesis "that computational
linguistics, if it were ever to process natural languages as people do,
would need to have available a store of lexical knowledge as exten-
sive as people have".
The challenge was to decide how a comprehensive lexical semantic
database for computation might be structured. One of the earliest and
most influential forms of lexical semantic analysis was componential
analysis, i.e. the analysis of the meaning of a word like man as human
+ malh + adult. However, by 1985 it was becoming clear that there
was no easily identifiable list of "conceptual atoms" and following
contemporary developments in the field, Miller adopted the idea that
word meaning could be characterised in terms of systematic relation-
ships to other words (Miller 1998a: xvi): for instance, table could be re-
lated tofurniture by an is-a-kind-of relation: this would not make the
claim that furniture was a component of the meaning of table, merely
that there was a systematic relationship of a particular kind between
the meaning of table (whatever that was) and the meaning offurniture
(whatever that was).
1 http://wordnet.princeton.edu/