Semantics analysis through elementary meanings

Thesaurus is a collection of words classified according to some relatedness measures among them. In this paper, we lay the theoretical foundations of thesaurus construction through elementary meanings of words. The concept of elementary meanings has been advocated and utilized in compiling Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus. If each word is supplied with elementary meanings so that all its meanings are covered by them in a standard fashion, we can define various similarity measures for a given set of words. Here we take an axiomatic way to analyze semantic structure of ups. Assuming an abstract semantic world, we deduce closed sets as generalized synonym sets. That is, we show that under certain natural axioms, we only need to consider closed sets as far as the semantics are concerned. We also show that the set of generalized synonyms described as a certain pair of closed sets has a lattice structure. In order to have a flexible thesaurus, we also analyze structure changes correspondi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: ACTA
• Authors: Youichi Kobuchi, Takashi Saito, Hidenobu Nunome
• Keywords: ACTA 2000, Elementary Meanings, Thesaurus, Word-meaning Relations