12-16 January (11:15-13:15) LOT Winter School (2026) Room HG-0G25
In this course, students will explore how lexical graphs can be used to represent and analyze word meaning across languages. We will focus on WordNet, and use it as a case study in how semantic relations—such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy—can be encoded in a structured network. Through hands-on exercises, students will learn how meanings are grouped into synsets, how these synsets are linked by semantic relations, and how such networks can model lexical organization in a way that supports linguistic inquiry.
A central theme of the course is cross-linguistic comparison. Using the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW), students will investigate how different languages carve up conceptual space, identifying cases of one-to-many sense correspondences, lexical gaps, and differences in morphology. This exploration highlights both the strengths of graph-based approaches—explicit structure, interpretability, and linguistic grounding—and their limitations, including issues of coverage, granularity, and cross-lingual alignment.
In the final part of the course, we will contrast these symbolic representations with distributional and embedding-based approaches to meaning. Students will see how large-scale statistical models capture lexical similarity in high-dimensional space, and will discuss how graph-based and vector-based representations can complement one another in modern research.
The course is hands-on and skills-focused. By the end, students will be able to navigate WordNet and OMW data programmatically, use them to test linguistic hypotheses, and critically assess how different computational models represent meaning. The methods introduced will provide a foundation for empirical research in lexical semantics, computational linguistics, and cross-linguistic analysis.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
| Day | Date | Topic | Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 01-12 | Word Meanings and Wordnets | |
| 2 | 01-13 | Multilingual WordNets and Lexical Structure | |
| 3 | 01-14 | Metaphor and Meaning | |
| 4 | 01-15 | Distributional Representations | |
| 5 | 01-16 | Language Maintenance and Low Resource Languages | |
| 6 | 01-15 | Schultink Lecture | 16:30, room HG-0A200 |
Shared folder:
The prerequisites for successful completion are the following:
Source code for this course available here https://github.com/bond-lab/Lexical-Semantics under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence — CC BY 4.0.