LexikoNet - a lexical database based on type and role hierarchies
Alexander Geyken, Norbert Schrader · 2006
In this paper LexikoNet, a large lexical ontology of German nouns is presented.Unlike GermaNet and the Princeton WordNet, LexikoNet has distinguished type and role hypernyms right from the outset and organizes those lexemes in a parallel, independent hierarchy.In addition to roles and types, LexikoNet uses meronymic and holonymic relations as well as the instance relation.LexikoNet is based on a conceptual hierarchy of currently 1,470 classes to which approximately 90,000 word senses taken from a large German monolingual dictionary, the Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (WDG), are attached.The conceptual classes provide a useful degree of abstraction for the lexicographic description of selectional restrictions, thus making LexikoNet a useful filtering tool for corpus based lexicographic analysis.LexikoNet is currently used in-house as a filter for lexicographic extraction tasks in the DWDS project.Furthermore, it is used as an classification tool of the 'words of the week' provided for the newspaper Die ZEIT on www.zeit.de.domestic ass, donkey, Equus asinus (domestic beast of burden descended from the African wild ass) ⇒ odd-toed ungulate, perissodactyl, perissodactyl mammal (placental mammals having hooves with an odd number of toes on each foot) ⇒ mammal A less well known example is the word 'hurricane'.In WordNet 2.1 the following inherited hypernym hierarchy is given: hurricane ⇒ a severe tropical cyclone usually with heavy rains and winds ⇒ cyclone (a violent rotating windstorm) ⇒ windstorm (a storm consisting of violent winds) ⇒ storm, violent storm (a violent weather condition with winds (11 on the Beaufort scale) and precipitation and thunder and lightening) ⇒ atmospheric phenomenon (a physical phenomenon associated with the atmosphere)