A Large Semantic Lexicon for Corpus Annotation

Semantic lexical resources play an important part in both corpus linguistics and NLP. Over the past 14 years, a large semantic lexical resource has been built at Lancaster University. Different from other major semantic lexicons in existence, such as WordNet, EuroWordNet and HowNet, etc., in which lexemes are clustered and linked via the relationship between word/MWE senses or definitions of meaning, the Lancaster semantic lexicon employs a semantic field taxonomy and maps words and multiword expression (MWE) templates to their potential semantic categories, which are disambiguated according to their context in use by a semantic tagger called USAS (UCREL semantic analysis system). The lexicon is classified with a set of broadly defined semantic field categories, which are organised in a thesaurus-like structure. The Lancaster semantic taxonomy provides a conception of the world that is as general as possible as opposed to a semantic network for some specific domains. This paper describes the Lancaster semantic lexicon both in terms of its semantic field taxonomy, lexical distribution across the semantic categories and lexeme/tag type ratio. As will be shown, the Lancaster semantic lexicon is a unique and valuable lexical resource that offers a large-scale generalpurpose semantically structured lexicon resource, which can have various applications in corpus linguistics and NLP.