Lexicography beyond dictionaries – Exploring semantic relations in African W ordnets focusing on adjectival structures

Abstract

Challenges encountered during the development of the African Wordnet, particularly lexical gaps and conceptual mismatches arising from modelling languages belonging to the family of Bantu languages through the expand approach based on the Princeton WordNet, are examined in this article. Many lexical items in Bantu languages encode culturally relevant concepts that are inadequately represented in existing synsets. The study argues for the inclusion of culturally specific synsets to improve coverage and support the documentation of indigenous knowledge. Focusing on isiZulu adjective constructions, it demonstrates that implementing semantic relations such as intensity and hyponymy yields a richer and more systematic representation of adjectival meaning than the predominantly antonymy-based structure currently employed. The findings support a semantically driven approach to African Wordnet development, informing lexicographic practice through more fine-grained and culturally grounded descriptions of meaning, and improving the applicability of the resource in language learning and computational tasks such as word sense disambiguation and machine translation.