Semantic Domains

Abstract

In this chapter we define the concept of Semantic Domain, recently introduced in Computational Linguistics [56] and successfully exploited in NLP [29]. This notion is inspired by the “Theory of Semantic Fields” [88], a structural model for lexical semantics proposed by Jost Trier at the beginning of the last century. The basic assumption is that the lexicon is structured into Semantic Fields: semantic relations among concepts belonging to the same field are very dense, while concepts belonging to different fields are typically unrelated. The theory of Semantic Fields constitutes the linguistic background of this work, and will be discussed in detail in Sect. 2.1. The main limitation of this theory is that it does not provide an objective criterion to distinguish among Semantic Fields. The concept of linguistic game allows us to formulate such a criterion, by observing that linguistic games are reected by texts in corpora.

Even if Semantic Fields have been deeply investigated in structural linguistics, computational approaches for them have been proposed quite recently by introducing the concept of Semantic Domain [59]. Semantic Domains are clusters of terms and texts that exhibit a high level of lexical coherence, i.e. the property of domain-specic words to co-occur together in texts. In the present work, we will refer to these kinds of relations among terms, concepts and texts by means of the term Domain Relations, adopting the terminology introduced by [56].