Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft

Nouns in GermaNet

Content

Semantic Relations
Semantic Fields
Lexical Gaps/Artificial Concepts

Semantic Relations

Besides synonymy and antonymy, the hyperonomy/hyponomy relation is the most prominent relation for nouns, building up a taxonomy of the world of noun concepts. Although this taxonomy has a clear hierarchical structure, it is not a tree, since cross-classification is frequently used for noun hyperonymy relations.

Meronymy is the other prominent relation for nouns. in GermaNet, as in WordNet meronymy is subclassified into 'is a component of', 'is member of', and 'is material that x is made of'. In addition, GermaNet has added the subclass 'is portion of'.

Semantic Fields

By and large, the division of nouns into semantic fields is the same as in WordNet. An overview of the semantic fields in GermaNet can be found on the Semantic Fields page. 

Lexical Gaps/Artificial Concepts

Artificial concepts are an additional device to group concepts within the taxonomy which do not have a lexical realization in German (resp. in another language). Suppose that we have to build a taxonomy for the concepts Mensch, Adelige/r, Fachkraft, Meister/in, and Akademiker/in. With all four terms being clear hyponyms of Mensch, the simplest way to achieve this is to build the following flat hierarchy:

This is, however, not an optimal solution, since Adelige/r denotes an origin, while Fachkraft, Meister/in, and Akademiker/in are commonly related to some educational status. Having no lexical realization in German for a person having some educational status or some specific origin, we introduce names for lexical gaps and mark them as artificial. Then we use them to rebuild the hierarchy as follows:

Suppose that we need to introduce Laie and Lerner/in into this hierarchy. If we introduce an extended concept of 'ausgebildeter_Mensch' to include its negation (and intermediate stages) we could subsume these words under such a node. The special branching status of that node is again specifically marked as artificial and we can finally build: