Semantics analysis through elementary meanings

Abstract. 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 word groups. 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 corresponding to three basic environmental changes: A new word-meaning relation is added, a new word or a new meaning is included with its word-meaning relations. Actually we give algorithms to have updated lattice structure from previous one for the three operations.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Electronics and Informatics, Ryukoku University, Seta, Otsu, 520-21 Japan (e-mail: kobuchi@rins.ryukoku.ac.jp; Fax: +81-77-543-7428) , , , , , , JP

   Youichi Kobuchi

2. Information System, Osaka Institute of Technology, 1-79-1, Kitayama, Hirakata, Osaka, 573-01 Japan (e-mail: saito@is.oit.ac.jp) , , , , , , JP

   Takashi Saito

3. Department of Biophysics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, 606 Japan , , , , , , JP

   Hidenobu Nunome

Received: 5 May 1996 / 21 February 2000

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