Lexicon

Lexicon

“A knowledge base about some subset of words in the vocabulary of a natural language. One component of a lexicon is a terminological ontology whose concept types represent the word senses in the lexicon. The lexicon may also contain additional information about the syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and usage of the words. Besides conventional dictionaries, lexicons include large collections of words and word senses, such as WordNet from Princeton University and EDR from the Japan Electronic Dictionary Research Institute, Ltd. Other examples include classification schemes, such as the Library of Congress subject headings or the Medical Subject Headers (MeSH).” (Sowa, 2004).

In psychology and cognitive science refer lexicon (i.e. mental lexicon) to the representation of words in the mind.

PS! The Danish word "leksikon" should not be confused with the English "lexicon". The first is a kind of encyclopedia (or encyclopedic dictionary) while the last term means a dictionary.

Literature:

Hirst, G. (2004). Ontology and the Lexicon. In: Staab, Steffen and Studer, Rudi (editors), Handbook on Ontologies, Berlin: Springer, 209-229. http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Hirst-Ontol-2003.pdf

Litkowski, K. C. (2005). Computational Lexicons and Dictionaries. IN: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier Publishers. http://www.clres.com/online-papers/ell.doc

Sowa, J. F. (2004). Glossary: http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/gloss.htm (Visited January 3, 2004).