Knowledge Structure
Both nouns and verbs are organized into hierarchies, defined by hypernym or IS A relationships. For instance, the first sense of the word dog would have the following hypernym hierarchy; the words at the same level are synonyms of each other: some sense of dog is synonymous with some other senses of domestic dog and Canis lupus familiaris, and so on. Each set of synonyms (synset), has a unique index and shares its properties, such as a gloss (or dictionary) definition.
dog, domestic dog, Canis familiaris => canine, canid => carnivore => placental, placental mammal, eutherian, eutherian mammal => mammal => vertebrate, craniate => chordate => animal, animate being, beast, brute, creature, fauna => ...At the top level, these hierarchies are organized into base types, 25 primitive groups for nouns, and 15 for verbs. These groups form lexicographic files at a maintenance level. These primitive groups are connected to an abstract root node that has, for some time, been assumed by various applications that use WordNet.
In the case of adjectives, the organization is different. Two opposite 'head' senses work as binary poles, while 'satellite' synonyms connect to each of the heads via synonymy relations. Thus, the hierarchies, and the concept involved with lexicographic files, do not apply here the same way they do for nouns and verbs.
The network of nouns is far deeper than that of the other parts of speech. Verbs have a far bushier structure, and adjectives are organized into many distinct clusters. Adverbs are defined in terms of the adjectives they are derived from, and thus inherit their structure from that of the adjectives.
Read more about this topic: WordNet
Famous quotes containing the words knowledge and/or structure:
“The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist struggle. This means that the world we have most intimately known, the world in which we feel “safe” ... must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone must change, not just those we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far served to check our revolutionary impulses.”
—Bell (c. 1955)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)