Content
Tops
By and large, the division of nouns into semantic fields is the same
as in WordNet (compare the contrastive table
of GermaNet and WordNet tops).
Relations
Besides synonymy and antonymy, the hyperonomy/hyponomy relation is the
most prominent relation for nouns, building up a taxonomy of the world
of noun concepts. Although this taxonomy has a clear hierarchical structure,
it is not a tree, since cross-classification is frequently used for noun
hyperonymy relations.
Meronymy is the other prominent relation for nouns. GermaNet does not
maintain WordNet's subclassification of meronymy into 'is a component of',
'is member of', and 'is stuff that x is made of". The only type of
meronymy recognized in GermaNet is the "is a component of" relation,
which is also the default value of WordNet's meronymy relation.
Lexical Gaps/Artificial Concepts
Lexical gaps are an additional device to group concepts within the taxonomy which do not have
a lexical realization in German (resp.in another language). Suppose that we have to build a taxonomy
for the concepts Mensch, Adelige/r, Fachkraft, MeisterIn, and AkademikerIn. With
all four terms being clear hyponyms of Mensch, the simplest way to achieve this is to build
the following flat hierarchy:
This is, however, not an optimal solution, since Adelige/r denotes an origin, while
Fachkraft, MeisterIn, and AkademikerIn are commonly related to some educational
status. Having no lexical realization in German for a person having some educational status or
some specific origin, we introduce lexical gaps, give them a name and mark them as artificial.
Then we use them to rebuild the hierarchy as follows:
Suppose that we need to introduce Laie and LernerIn into this hierarchy.
If we introduce an extended concept of ?ausgebildeter_Mensch to include its negation
(and intermediate stages) we could subsume these words under such a node. The special branching
status of that node is again specifically marked as artificial and we can finally build: