Cognitively salient relations for multilingual lexicography

Abstract

Providing sets of semantically related words in the lexical entries of an electronic dictionary should help language learners quickly understand the meaning of the target words. Relational information might also improve memorisation, by allowing the generation of structured vocabulary study lists. However, an open issue is which semantic relations are cognitively most salient, and should therefore be used for dictionary construction. In this paper, we present a concept description elicitation experiment conducted with German and Italian speakers. The analysis of the experimental data suggests that there is a small set of concept-class-dependent relation types that are stable across languages and robust enough to allow discrimination across broad concept domains. Our further research will focus on harvesting instantiations of these classes from corpora.

A set of semantic norms for German and Italian

“…Furthermore, some concept classes have similar distributions within a language, most evidently "fruit" and "vegetables" in the German data, which makes sense given that they both can be subsumed under the broad class of "eatable plants"; other classes have markedly different distributions, e.g., compare "fruit" and "implements", where for "implements" a lot of relations of types part and function were produced in contrast to the "fruit" class, which in turn is characterised by a larger number of category and quality relations than in the "implement" class. Further research on this data set investigating the cognitive salience of semantic relations is presented in Kremer, Abel, and Baroni (2008).…”

Teksgebaseerde tesourusgebruik in 'n Afrikaanse taalonderrigkonteks

“…'n Tesourus is nie 'n bekende en algemeen gebruikte leksikografiese naslaanbron onder onderwysers nie. Tog verwys Tasovac (2012: 242) na navorsing in opvoedkundige leksikografie wat daarop dui dat die voorsiening van stelle semanties verwante woorde in 'n leksikografiese inskrywing taalaanleerders kan help om betekenis te verstaan en hul memorisering te verbeter (Geckeler 2002, Kremer et al 2008. Van Schalkwyk (1996: 286) beveel in 'n resensie van die Groot Tesourus van Afrikaans die onderrig van tesourusgebruik aan deur dit as 'n "noodsaaklikheid" te bestempel: Waarop die voorafgaande afstuur, is die wenslikheid, nee, noodsaaklikheid dat die bestaan en waardevolle gebruike van die tesourus as besondere soort woordeboek dieselfde gebruiksfrekwensie verkry as verklarende en vertalende (tweetalige) woordeboeke.…”