Senses of Polysemous Nouns: Building a Computational Lexicon of Basic Japanese Nouns

摘要

We have constructed the IPA Lexicon of Basic Japanese Nouns (IPAL-BN), which has a hierarchical structure based on the syntactic and semantic properties of nouns. In our lexicon, each lexical entry consists of subentries, and subentries have semantic property information. Among these elements, we focus here on the subentry description. Conventional Japanese dictionaries only enumerate various usages. But it is also important to clarify the semantic relations between subentries. Thus we have developed a method for specifying the kind of relationship between subentries, using special cognitive devices such as metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. After a brief review of the structure of our lexicon, we discuss how the method can be applied to the lexical description.