E-HowNet and Automatic Construction of a Lexical Ontology.

In this paper, we propose a lexical senses representation system called E-HowNet, in which the lexical senses are defined by basic concepts. As a result, the meanings of expressions are more specific than those derived by using primitives. We also design an ontology to express the taxo-nomic relations between concepts and the attributes of concepts. To establish the taxonomic relations between word senses, we introduce a strategy that constructs the E-HowNet ontology automatically. We then implement the lexical ontology as a Web application to demonstrate the taxonomy and the search functions for querying key-terms and E-HowNet expressions in the lexicon, which contains more than 88,000 lexical senses.