Sense Relations

Dictionary Entries
• Red /rɛd/ n: the color resembling blood or a ruby.
• Blood /blʌd/ n: the red liquid that circulates in the
heart, arteries and veins of animals.
• Do dictionaries give us definitions?
• Some are circular.
• All are defined in terms of other lexemes.
• We need to know something to learn something.
• What can we learn from dictionaries?
• Relations between words:
– Oppositions, similarities, hierarchies
 Major Sense Relations
• Hyponymy
• Synonymy
• Antonymy
• Homonymy
• Polysemy
• Meronymy
 Hyponymy
• Hyponymy is the notion of inclusion
• X is a hyponym of Y if X is a subset of Y.
• For example, consider the two words “bird” and
“parakeet”.
– Tweety, Sascha, and Polly are parakeets.
– The current set of parakeets contains these three
members which are its hyponyms.
– The current set of bird contains at least these three
members, possibly others.
– Parakeet is a subset of bird, so parakeet is a
hyponym of bird.
• Cruse (1986): X is a hyponym of Y if  
– the sentence "X is necessarily Y" is normal, but
– the sentence "Y is necessarily X" is not normal.
• "Parrot" is a hyponym of "bird" since the
sentence "A parrot is necessarily a bird" is
normal, but the sentence *"A bird is necessarily
a parrot" is not normal.
• It involves moving from a more general to a
more specific.

Superordinate
Sheep
Hyponyms
ram ewe lamb
 Synonymy
• Synonymy is the notion of sameness of meaning.
• Synonymy – two words are synonymous if the
substitution of one for the other does not change the
truth value of a sentence in which the substitution is
made.
– How big is that plane?
– How large is that plane?
• Two words are synonymous if they share the
same meaning.
• Two words are synonymous if the sets of
entities they select are equivalent.
• Synonyms are almost never truly substitutable.
• While it is difficult to find two exactly identical
words, there are examples of synonyms in our
everyday language.
 Problems in Synonymy
• Register
• Style
• Emotive and Evaluative Meaning
• Collocation
• Sense
• Identical meaning?
– Kingly/royal/regal
– Brotherly/fraternal
– Buy/purchase
– World/universe
– Fall/Autumn
– Statesman/politician
– Thrifty/economical/stingy
 Antonymy
• In its barest form, antonyms refers to the
condition of being opposites.
• Many antonymous relations can be reliably
detected by looking for statistical correlations in
large text collections (Justeson &Katz, 1991).
• Lexical opposites
– Antonym (large, small)
– Antonym (big, small)
– Antonym (big, little)
– but not large, little
 Kinds of Antonyms
• Gradable antonyms
• These describe something which can be compared with
something else. Often occur in binominal pairs: Fast and
slow; small and big; hot and cold; dry and wet.
• Complementary Antonyms
• They offer a choice relationship. Examples are alive and
dead: you are either alive or dead, not somewhere in-
between.
• Relational Opposites
• These antonyms express reciprocity and depend on each
other. For example, buy and sell. You cannot buy something
without someone else selling it to you. Other examples are
borrow and lend; wife and husband.
• Antipodals
• Situated on the opposite side
• Gradable: • Relational Opposites
– Wide – narrow – Buy – sell
– Short – long – Married – divorced
– – Live - die
short-long
– wide-narrow • Reverses:
– high-low – tie-untie
• Complementary: – arrive-leave
– Married – single – ascend-descend
– Husband – wife • Antipodals:
– Boy – girl – left-right
– Summer – winter – up-down
 Gradable versus Simple Antonyms
• Gradable antonyms (e.g., young-old, fast-slow)
welcome various kinds of intensifiers: very,
really, extremely, a lot.
• Simple antonyms (e.g., male-female, extant-
extinct) do not.
• Gradable antonyms can both be false.
• Simple antonyms cannot both be false.
 Which of the following pairs of antonyms
are simple and which are gradable?

a. private-public
b. clean-dirty
c. enemy-friend
d. cold-hot
e. temporary-permanent
f. young-old
g. legal-illegal
 Homonymy and Polysemy
• A word with two or more possible meanings is
called an ambiguous word.
• There are two sources of ambiguity: homonymy
and polysemy.
• A word with multiple possible meanings need
not be ambiguous; it may simply be vague.
 Homonymy
• Homonyms are lexemes that have the same form
with unrelated meanings
– Bank, Satellite
• Homophones
– Wait/Weight
• Homographs
– Bass
/beɪs/ (low-pitched sound or tone)
/bæs/ (fish)
• Cause ambiguity in different ways depending on the
application
• Speech recognition
• Homophones
• Text to speech
• Homographs
• Give me some bass
 Polysemy
• Most words have more than one sense
– Homonym: same word, different meaning
• bank (river)
• bank (financial)
– Polysemy: different senses of same word
• That dog has floppy ears.
• She has a good ear for jazz.
• bank (financial) has several related senses
– the building, the institution, the notion of where money is stored
– Distinct but related meanings
– idea bank, sperm bank, blood bank
 Meronymy
• Meronymy like synonymy, antonymy and
hyponymy is a kind of lexical/sense relationship
which looks at the relationship between parts
(meronyms) and wholes (holonyms), such as
finger and hand or door and handle.
• X is a part of Y is the syntactic frame in which
the meronymic relation between word pairs can
be recognized (e.g. a finger is a part of a hand).
• The semantic relation that holds between a part
and the whole
• A meronym is a word that names a part of a
larger whole: ’brim’ and ’crown’ ar meronyms of
hat.
• Parts-of relation
– part of (beak, bird)
– part of (bark, tree)
• Transitive conceptually but not lexically:
– The knob is a part of the door.
– The door is a part of the house.