Psychological Justification
The goal of WordNet was to develop a system that would be consistent with the knowledge acquired over the years about how human beings process language. Anomic aphasia, for example, creates a condition that seems to selectively encumber individuals' ability to name objects; this makes the decision to partition the parts of speech into distinct hierarchies more of a principled decision than an arbitrary one.
In the case of hyponymy, psychological experiments revealed that individuals can access properties of nouns more quickly depending on when a characteristic becomes a defining property. That is, individuals can quickly verify that canaries can sing because a canary is a songbird (only one level of hyponymy), but require slightly more time to verify that canaries can fly (two levels of hyponymy) and even more time to verify canaries have skin (multiple levels of hyponymy). This suggests that we too store semantic information in a way that is much like WordNet, because we only retain the most specific information needed to differentiate one particular concept from similar concepts.
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