# Lexical Semantics **Domain:** Linguistics / Natural Language Processing **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed **Related:** [[wiki/Word Sense Disambiguation|Word Sense Disambiguation]], [[wiki/WordNet|WordNet]], [[wiki/Ontology|Ontology]], [[wiki/Semantic Network|Semantic Network]], [[wiki/Distributional Semantics|Distributional Semantics]] --- ## Definition **Lexical semantics studies word meaning, sense distinctions and relations among lexical items.** Important relations include synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy and association. These relations answer different questions. Synonyms share aspects of meaning; a hypernym names a broader type; a hyponym names a narrower type; distributional neighbors occur in similar contexts without necessarily sharing a taxonomic relation. ## Symbolic Language Engine Context The Word Explorer inside [[wiki/VersePerfect|VersePerfect]] partitioned words into numbered senses and exposed typed relations such as _Synonyms_, _Type of_, _Types_ and _See also_. That interface demonstrates semantic structure beyond a flat thesaurus. The [[wiki/Semantic Network|Hyperbolic Thesaurus]] made some relations spatially traversable, while [[wiki/Living Language — Proximal Frequency Research Reference|Living Language — Proximal Frequency Research Reference]] pursued corpus-derived concept neighborhoods. Keeping these representations separate prevents “related” from becoming an unexplained universal relation. ## Key Insight **Words can be near each other in several incompatible senses of nearness. Lexical semantics makes the relation explicit.** ## See Also [[wiki/Word Sense Disambiguation|Word Sense Disambiguation]], [[wiki/WordNet|WordNet]], [[wiki/Synset vs Concept Set|Synset vs Concept Set]], [[wiki/Semantic Network|Semantic Network]], [[wiki/Distributional Semantics|Distributional Semantics]], [[wiki/Ontology|Ontology]] ## Sources / Provenance - Primary project account: [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]]. - D. A. Cruse, *Lexical Semantics* (1986). - [[wiki/WordNet|WordNet]] lexical database architecture.