On Universal Colexifications

Hongchang Bao, Bradley Hauer, Grzegorz Kondrak


Abstract
Colexification occurs when two distinct concepts are lexified by the same word. The term covers both polysemy and homonymy. We posit and investigate the hypothesis that no pair of concepts are colexified in every language. We test our hypothesis by analyzing colexification data from BabelNet, Open Multilingual WordNet, and CLICS. The results show that our hypothesis is supported by over 99.9% of colexified concept pairs in these three lexical resources.
Anthology ID:
2021.gwc-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference
Month:
January
Year:
2021
Address:
University of South Africa (UNISA)
Editors:
Piek Vossen, Christiane Fellbaum
Venue:
GWC
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Global Wordnet Association
Note:
Pages:
1–7
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.gwc-1.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hongchang Bao, Bradley Hauer, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2021. On Universal Colexifications. In Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference, pages 1–7, University of South Africa (UNISA). Global Wordnet Association.
Cite (Informal):
On Universal Colexifications (Bao et al., GWC 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.gwc-1.1.pdf