Category: What is … ? Series

BabelNet is an multilingual encyclopaedic dictionary, which features open data and was created by the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at the Sapienza University of Rome. BabelNet is an ontology, defined using BabelNet as “a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their…

A wordnet is a lexical database of a language that links words according to their semantic relations. The Princeton WordNet was the very first wordnet to be developed, and is frequently the model used to develop subsequent wordnets, in English and other languages. Other wordnets include: The unit of analysis in a wordnet is the…

Semantic relations are the ways that words are connected to other words. There are many different types of semantic relations, some of which are explained here: We can see example of each of these relations below: We can investigate the semantic relations between words using a wordnet, which we will explore in the next post.

When learning a second language, you may come across the puzzling term “collocation”. Cambridge English Dictionary defines a collocation as “a word or phrase that is often used with another word or phrase, in a way that sounds correct to people who have spoken the language all their lives, but might not be expected from…

Sketch Engine, according to its website, is “the ultimate tool to explore how language works”.  Essentially, it is an online tool which allows you to analyse language and boasts 700 corpora in over a hundred languages.  With Sketch Engine, you can investigate language at the level of words, phrases or whole texts. In terms of…

If you study languages and linguistics, it’s very likely that you’ll come across the word corpus. A corpus (plural corpora) is “a collection of written or spoken material stored on a computer and used to find out how language is used”, and can be used in academic fields like corpus linguistics. There are several different…

Lemma is a word that I first heard in a lexicography class during my year abroad and, ironically, I didn’t know what it meant and had to look it up. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, a lemma is “a form of a word that appears as an entry in a dictionary and is used…