Lexicon and meaning between theory and practice

A natural language processing system depends on the syntactic, morphological and semantic structure of the sentence. Semantics has received, in recent years, the greatest interest and the best results in NLP studies. The present contribution studies in detail, from a linguistic-theoretical point of view, the semantic relations existing between lexemes. The paper intends to highlight how these semantic relationships are closely linked to the field of NLP, full of new technologies and innovative application perspectives. It also examines some semantic-lexical relationships from which ItalWordNet (IWN) is created. IWN is an online lexical database that does not organize information according to the traditional process of the alphabetical order, but rather according to the semantic-lexical relationship between words. IWN represents, in the computational field, a necessity for NLP. Many semantic relations are implemented in the construction of IWN: synonymy, hypernym / hyponymy, antinomy, meronym / holonym, causality. The lexical subsystems, precisely, the semantic family, is adopted in the relations labeled "derivation" and "liable_to" / "has_liability".