Learning Linguistic Concepts Through the Construction of Dictionaries with a Directed Acyclic Graph Shaped Taxonomy

Abstract

In general the global pedagogical goal of the creation and use of dictionaries is the mastery of languages. The specific goal is to facilitate the assimilation of basic linguistic concepts: lexicon, sense (meaning), semantic categories, lexico-semantic relations, etc. In this paper, we describe the linguistic concepts that constitute the pedagogical goals to attain, as well as the constructivist model of learning. The conceptual knowledge linked to the terms is arranged in taxonomies. However, in our previous work, the concepts and their relationships were represented as simple hierarchical trees. Nevertheless, these taxonomies are quite limited and thus do not capture the complexities of reality in a given area, as they only allow a category to have one parent category. We thus opted for a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to represent the conceptual knowledge as this structure allows a more specific category to be the child of multiple broader categories. With these requirements we have developed tools to direct the activities that allow building and querying monolingual dictionaries based on a DAG-shaped taxonomy. Using these tools to build a dictionary, users can learn in a simple and natural way some semantic aspects that are necessary for the mastery of languages.