Modelling Lexical Databases with Formal Concept Analysis

This paper provides guidelines and examples for visualising lexical relations using Formal Concept Analysis. Relations in lexical databases often form trees, imperfect trees or poly-hierarchies which can be embedded into concept lattices. Many-to-many relations can be represented as concept lattices where the values from one domain are used as the formal objects and the values of the other domain as formal attributes. This paper further discusses algorithms for selecting meaningful subsets of lexical databases, the representation of complex relational structures in lexical databases and the use of lattices as basemaps for other lexical relations.