Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon

SemanticNet is a semantic network of lexicons to hold human pragmatic knowledge. So far Natural Language Processing (NLP) research patronized much of manually augmented lexicon resources such as WordNet. But the small set of semantic relations like Hypernym, Holonym, Meronym and Synonym etc are very narrow to capture the wide variations human cognitive knowledge. But no such information could be retrieved from available lexicon resources. SemanticNet is the attempt to capture wide range of context dependent semantic inference among various themes which human beings perceive in their pragmatic knowledge, learned by day to day cognitive interactions with the surrounding physical world. SemanticNet holds human pragmatics with twenty well established semantic relations for every pair of lexemes. As every pair of relations cannot be defined by fixed number of certain semantic relation labels thus additionally contextual semantic affinity inference in SemanticNet could be calculated by network distance and represented as a probabilistic score. SemanticNet is being presently developed for Bengali language. 1 Historical Motivation Semantics (from Greek "σημαντικός" semantikos) is the study of meaning, usually in language. The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. We studied with various Psycholinguistics experiments to understand how human natural intelligence helps to understand general semantic from nature. Our study was to understand the human psychology about semantics beyond language. We were haunting for the intellectual structure of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce natural languages. Let’s come with an example of simple conversation about movie between two persons. Person A: Have you seen the movie ‘No Man's Land’? How