The generation of representations of word meanings from dictionaries

This paper describes the generation of iconic and categorical representations of word meaning, in propositional form, from the WordNet lexical database. These are derived from the list of synonyms, the descriptive gloss, and from the hypernym and meronym relations of each WordNet word sense. We demonstrate that these representations promote identification and discrimination , these being suggested qualities of representations of meaning, and finally suggest that these representations have further applications in language engineering.