Word Meanings and Wordnets (01-12)

• Introduction to word meaning (slides)

  We will start by introducing (or I expect for most of you revising) the basics of word meaning, both from a general linguistic point of view and then a little on computational representations such as wordnets.

• Exploring word meaning with wordnets (and python) (slides)
  • Introduction to the wn module
  • Wn Module documentation
  • Wordnet tutorial on google colab

Using wordnet

1. Use the wn module to load omw-en:1.4 (Princeton Wordnet 3.0 formatted for WN)

   import wn
   wn.download('omw-en:1.4')
   ewn=wn.Wordnet('omw-en:1.4')
   

2. Look at the different synsets for bird
   • How many are there?
   • What are their definitions?
   • How deep in the hierarchy are they?
   • For each synset, print out each sense and its frequency (hint freqency of a lemma is given by sense.counts)
   • Give the total frequency for each synset
3. Look at some adjectives: Compare big, large, great. What are their antonyms?
4. Multiword Expressions (Collocations): A multiword expression (MWE) like big sister has its own WordNet entry.
   • Which combinations of big/large/great sister/uncle/toe are listed in WordNet?
5. Find all hyponyms (including hyponyms of hyponyms, ...) for the colour red!
   • Use closure (shown in the tutorial)
6. Tabulate the average polysemy per word length for all words in one language in wordnet, and then seperately for each part of speech.
   • polysemy is number of synsets/word
   • you can get all words by [w for w in ewn.words()]
   • for just nouns you can do: [w for w in ewn.synsets(pos='n')]
   • if you use just wn then you get all words for all languages, this can be a lot!

Further work -- at home

1. Find all nouns in English that are both animals and people
   • Use the topic (aka lexfile, supersense (synset.lexfile())
   e.g. dog, lamb
2. Do you notice any patterns?

Readings/Preparation

• Read Kroeger (2022) Part II Word Meanings.
• Install python (>= 3.10) and the wn (>=0.14) module
  If you have an older python on you system, I suggest you use uv or something similar to make a virtual environment. If that is beyond you, we can go through it after class, an older version is fine for the first day.

References

• Christiane Fellbaum, ed. (1998) Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press
• Kroeger, Paul (2022) Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. 3rd. edn. (Textbooks in Language Sciences 5). Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Sidney I. Landau (1989) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• Lyons, John (1977) Semantics. Cambridge University Press
• Saeed, John (2009). Semantics. 4th Edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
• WordNet
  • Browse the Open English WordNet: https://en-word.net/
  • The Open Multilingual Wordnet (1.0): https://compling.upol.cz/ntumc/cgi-bin/wn-gridx.cgi?gridmode=ntumcgrid
  • The Open Multilingual Wordnet (2.0): http://compling.upol.cz/omw/
  • OMW Documentation: https://omwn.org/docs.html (POS, relations, topics, adjective positions)