Attributesswords

Attributesswords is a term used in linguistics and knowledge representation to refer to words that encode attributes or properties of entities. The term, formed from attributes and words, describes lexical items that function as property descriptors when they modify nouns or participate in attribute-value annotations in datasets and ontologies.

In practice, attributesswords include adjectives such as red, large, ancient, and portable, as well as attributive noun phrases like solar panel or high-resolution display, where the word preceding the noun signals a characteristic. They can also form multiword expressions that express a property value, for example two-meter-long or battery-powered.

These words play a central role in natural language processing, information extraction, and knowledge graph construction because they provide the property layer that links entities to descriptive values. Systems that annotate text or build schemas often rely on identifying attributesswords to populate attribute-value pairs, constrain queries, or improve disambiguation.

Relation to other concepts: attributesswords overlap with adjectives, attributive nouns, and property words. The distinction is not semantic but functional: attributesswords are those words primarily used to convey attributes rather than actions, relations, or identities. Limitations include cross-linguistic variation, context dependence, and polysemy, which can affect whether a term should be treated as an attribute descriptor in a given task.

See also: adjectives, attributes, ontology, knowledge graph, attribute-value modeling.