Lexfom: a lexical functions ontology model

A lexical function represents a type of relation that exists between lexical units (words or expressions) in any language. For example, the antonymy is a type of relation that is represented by the lexical function Anti: Anti(big) = small. Those relations include both paradigmatic relations, i.e. vertical relations, such as synonymy, antonymy and meronymy and syntagmatic relations, i.e. horizontal relations, such as objective qualification (legitimate demand), subjective qualification (fruitful analysis), positive evaluation (good review) and support verbs (pay a visit, subject to an interrogation). In this paper, we present the Lexical Functions Ontology Model (lexfom) to represent lexical functions and the relation among lexical units. Lexfom is divided in four modules: lexical function representation (lfrep), lexical function family (lffam), lexical function semantic perspective (lfsem) and lexical function relations (lfrel). Moreover, we show how it combines to Lexical Model for Ontologies (lemon), for the transformation of lexical networks into the semantic web formats. So far, we have implemented 100 simple and 500 complex lexical functions, and encoded about 8,000 syntagmatic and 46,000 paradigmatic relations, for the French language.