The Integral Dictionary: A Lexical Network Based on Componential Semantics

The Integral Dictionary is a comprehensive lexical network for French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish. It is based on componential semantics and lexical functions. The network structure superimposes two graphs. A first graph consists of a hierarchy of concepts divided into classes and themes where the words form the terminal nodes of the graph. A second graph links the words together using lexical functions derived from the Meaning-Text theory. We first introduce the lexical network whose database for French words is comparable in its size to that of WordNet. We then describe two semantic distances to evaluate the proximity of two words in the graph and to find their distinctive semantic components. Finally, we give examples of applications we developed with it: the search of a word from a definition and the extraction of the semantic features of a text.