Automatic Extraction of Semantic Relations for Less­Resourced Languages

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2009 workshop WordNets and other Lexical Semantic Resources — between Lexical Semantics, Lexicography, Terminology and Formal Ontologies. Editors: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Anna Braasch, Sanni Nimb and Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 7 (2009), 1-6. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9209

The semantics and morphology of household container names in Icelandic and Dutch

In this paper, we report an experiment on the naming of household containers in Dutch and Icelandic carried out as part of the Evolution of Semantic Systems project (EoSS; Majid et al., 2011). This naming experiment allows us to support and elaborate on a hypothesis by Malt et al. (2003) that productive morphology in the naming domain can have an influence on boundary placement within the extensional space. Specifically, we demonstrate that the Dutch diminutive -(t)je favours a cut between small items versus others, whereas Icelandic, which does not use the diminutive in this domain, favours a cut between large items and others. This is not a typological effect, as Dutch and Icelandic are both Germanic languages and both have diminutive morphology available in principle. We find no evidence that the diminutive produces a proliferation of terms and/or fine-grained nesting within the extensional domain. Rather, the Dutch diminutive favours a more even distribution of terms across the space whereas Icelandic favours broad inclusive terms with a number of narrower specialist terms. Further, the extensional space defined by the diminutive is not associated with its own clear prototypical exemplar. Using evidence from compounding and modification, we also consider which semantic features are prominent in differentiating categories within the domain. By far the most prominent in both languages is the inferred contents of the container. Other than contents, however, the languages differ in the range and prominence of features such as intended usage or material of composition. Our results demonstrate that in order to understand the processes that produce semantic divisions of basic object classes, we should consider fine-grained analyses of closely related languages alongside analyses of typologically different languages

Lexicon acquisition through Noun Clustering

This paper describes an experiment with clustering of Icelandicnouns based on semantic relatedness. This work is part of a largerproject aiming at semi-automatically constructing a semantic databasefor Icelandic language technology. The harvested semantic clustersalso provide valuable information for traditional lexicography

Samspil máls og merkingar. Um litaheiti í íslensku táknmáli

Publisher's version (útgefin grein)Brent Berlin og Paul Kay ullu straumhvörfum í merkingarlegum rannsóknum á litaheitum með útgáfu bókar sinnar Basic Color Terms árið 1969. Fram að þeim tíma hafði verið talið að hvert mál hefði sína eigin hugtakaskiptingu, og í sambandi við litaheiti var sú hugmynd styrkt af þeirri staðreynd að litrófið er ein samfelld heild þar sem hvergi sjást greinileg skil á milli litbrigða. Þrátt fyrir gagnrýni á niðurstöður þeirra hafa margir séð nytsemina í aðferðafræðinni og nýtt til rannsókna á margvíslegum málum. Rannsóknin Evolution of Semantic Systems, 2011-2012, var ein af þeim og í þessari grein er fjallað um niðurstöður rannsóknar sem fylgdi í fótspor hennar, Litir í samhengi, en hún gerði athugun á íslensku táknmáli. Táknmál eru að mörgu leyti mjög frábrugðið raddmálum, en svo virðist sem hugtakaskipting á sviði litaheita sé sú sama og í raddmálum. Fá kjarnahugtök, sem Berlin og Kay nefndu grunnlitaheiti, skipta upp litrófinu, en á milli þessara aðalhugtaka er meiri fjölbreytni.Brent Berlin and Paul Kay brought a sea change in semantic studies of colour terms when they published their book Basic Color Terms in 1969. Up to that point the domi-nant view was that each language represented a unique conceptual organisation of the world, a view supported by the fact that the colour spectrum is a continuum which provides not obvious breaks for the purposes of naming. Despite the many criticisms of their work which have followed, their methodology has proven ex-tremely infl uential and been widely adopted. The project Evolution of Semantic Sys-tems, 2011–2012, adopted their methodology for a study of colour terms in the Indo-European languages and the Colours in Context project applied the same methods to a study of Icelandic Sign Language. Signed languages diff er in many ways from spoken languages but the results of this study suggest the broad organisation of the colour space is the same in Icelandic Sign Language, Icelandic and British English. The colour space is organised by a few dominant terms, largely the same as Berlin and Kay ́s original basic colour terms. Yet within that broad patt ern is considerable microvariation, especially in the spaces between the dominant terms. There the char-acteristic patt erns of word formation in the language have a clear infl uence in colour naming strategies.Peer Reviewe

Icelandic Language Resources and Technology: Status and Prospects

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2009 workshop Nordic Perspectives on the CLARIN Infrastructure of Language Resources. Editors: Rickard Domeij, Kimmo Koskenniemi, Steven Krauwer, Bente Maegaard, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson and Koenraad de Smedt. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 5 (2009), 27-32. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9207