Philosophising Lexical Meaning as an OntoLex-Lemon Extension

Veruska Zamborlini, Jiaqi Zhu, Marieke van Erp, Arianna Betti


Abstract
OntoLex-Lemon is a model for representing lexical information, focusing on the use of lexical entries in texts rather than their definitions. This work proposes an extension to the model that aims to capture the definition of senses attributed to lexical entries. We explicitly represent a conceptual setup authored by an agent that operates on lexical content. It either proposes new senses for existing lexical entries in a language or coins new terms to express proposed senses. It provides textual and/or formal definitions to senses/concepts, and can serve as an interpretation of other senses/concepts through rephrasing, translation, formalization, or comparison. Because a conceptual setup and its interpretations may not be unanimously accepted, it is important to support the selection of relevant meanings, as for example, those proposed by a certain author. We illustrate the application of our proposed extension with two case studies, one about the philosophical definition of the concept of idea and its interpretations, and one about historical attributions of meaning to the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
Anthology ID:
2025.ontolex-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge: The 5th OntoLex Workshop
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Naples, Italy
Editors:
Katerina Gkirtzou, Slavko Žitnik, Jorge Gracia, Dagmar Gromann, Maria Pia di Buono, Johanna Monti, Maxim Ionov
Venues:
ontolex | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Unior Press
Note:
Pages:
46–57
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ontolex-1.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Veruska Zamborlini, Jiaqi Zhu, Marieke van Erp, and Arianna Betti. 2025. Philosophising Lexical Meaning as an OntoLex-Lemon Extension. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge: The 5th OntoLex Workshop, pages 46–57, Naples, Italy. Unior Press.
Cite (Informal):
Philosophising Lexical Meaning as an OntoLex-Lemon Extension (Zamborlini et al., ontolex 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ontolex-1.6.pdf