Human Language

Meaning

Meaning in NLP refers to the interpretation and understanding of words, phrases, and sentences in a way that captures the intended sense or information conveyed by human language.

WordNet

To demonstrate how to extract usable meaning in a computer using WordNet from the NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) library in Python, we can focus on synonyms and hypernyms. WordNet is a lexical database of the English language that relates words to one another in terms of synonyms, hypernyms (more abstract terms), hyponyms (more specific terms), etc.

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
poses = {
    "n": "noun",
    "v": "verb",
    "s": "adj (s)",
    "a": "adj",
    "r": "adv"
}

for synset in wn.synsets('good'):
  print(f'{poses[synset.pos()]}: {",".join([l.name() for l in synset.lemmas()])}')noun: good
noun: good,goodness
noun: good,goodness
noun: commodity,trade_good,good
adj: good
adj (s): full,good
adj: good
adj (s): estimable,good,honorable,respectable
adj (s): beneficial,goo
adj (s): effective,good,in_effect,in_force
adv: well,good
adv: thoroughly,soundly
from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn

panda = wn.synset('panda.n.01')
hyper = lambda s: s.hypernyms()
hs = list(panda.closure(hyper))
for h in hs:
  print(h)

Synset('procyonid.n.01')
Synset('carnivore.n.01')
Synset('placental.n.01')
ynset('mammal.n.01')
Synset('vertebrate.n.01')
Synset('chordate.n.01')
Synset('animal.n.01')
Synset('organism.n.01')
Synset('living_thing.n.01')
Synset('whole.n.02')
Synset('object.n.01')
Synset('physical_entity.n.01')
Synset('entity.n.01')

Problems with wordnet

  1. Limited Coverage: Primarily focused on English, lacks coverage for domain-specific or new terms.
  2. Lack of Multilingual Support: Limited support for languages other than English.
  3. Not Suitable for All NLP Tasks: Limited for tasks requiring deep semantic understanding or handling polysemy.

Researchers often complement WordNet with dynamic embeddings or leverage more advanced techniques for improved performance.

Representing Words as Discrete Symbols:

Examples: