Orð og tunga - 01.06.2012, Page 22

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Orð og tunga
term does not really describe a subkind as such but rather a subjective
evaluation of an item; a daub may indeed be a kind of painting but
any painting can be termed a daub if the speaker assesses its qual-
ity to be at a certain level. Terms like klatmnlcri 'daub' therefore cut
across the hyponyms of maleri 'painting': they are orthogonal to the
classification. DanNet therefore allows the hyponym relation to be
tagged with a feature ortho which indicates that the term represents
an evaluation that can apply to any "co-hyponym" of the term.
Even this relatively brief discussion illustrates well the challenges
that face the construction of a wordnet which is to be sufficiently rich-
ly and systematically elaborated to be used in advanced nlp applica-
tions. We will now turn to a third resource, quite unlike the two that
we have reviewed so far, which is developed around a very different
aspect of sense organisation.
4 SALDO
saldo3 is "a free full-scale modern Swedish semantic and morpho-
logical lexical resource intended primarily for use in language tech-
nology applications" (Borin & Forsberg 2009: 7). It is based on a much
looser associative relation that we typically find in wordnets - espe-
cially as the relation is not sensitive to part of speech. In fact there is
only one obligatory relation in saldo (mother) and one optional rela-
tion (father). The mother will be a more central concept, i.e. semanti-
cally and/or morphologically less complex, probably more frequent,
stylistically more unmarked, and acquired earlier in first and second
language acquisition. The father will be a differentiating term (often a
domain-specifier) (Borin & Forsberg 2009: 7f). For example, the noun
sol 'sun' has as a mother the verb lysa 'shine'; the father of sol 'sun'
is himmel 'sky', i.e. the domain or context in which the shining takes
place (Borin & Forsberg 2009: 10). The simplest way to grasp the es-
sential intuition upon which saldo's semantic classification is built is
to imagine how you would define a word if you were dealing with
someone with very limited vocabulary. You might attempt to indicate
what the sun was by saying that it was the thing in the sky which
shines. Shining is the most salient characteristic of the sun and the sky
is the place that one needs to look to find it.
3 http://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/saldo