Lexical semantic information

The treatment of semantics in lexica for spoken language systems  is less uniform than that of word forms, and tends to be highly application-specific:

• In single word control systems, a direct mapping to an operation or action is sufficient.
• In a dictation system , a mapping to text is needed, with or without deeper analysis.
• Conversely, in a text-to-speech system , a full semantic analysis is also not generally necessary.
• In a database front end application, a translation into a database query language is required.
• In a spoken language understanding or translation system  sophisticated kinds of semantic representation such as artificial intelligence representation languages (semantic networks or frame structures), or more general formalisms such as first order predicate calculus or typed attribute logics are required.

An outline of some of the basic lexical semantic relations between lexical units was given at the beginning of this section in the context of the discussion of relations between lexical units  (lexical relations).

Reference should be made to the results of the EAGLES Computational Lexica Working Group for further information on lexical semantics, and to standard texts such as [Lyons (1977)] or [Cruse (1986)].