LexSet

LexSet is a software framework and data collection designed to support the analysis of lexical sets in phonology, lexicography, and natural language processing. Developed originally by scholars in linguistic typology, the platform provides a structured repository of words grouped by shared phonological or semantic properties, facilitating comparative studies across languages and dialects. The core of LexSet consists of a database that encodes each lexical entry with attributes such as orthography, phonetic transcription (often in IPA), part‑of‑speech tags, and morphological annotations. Users can query the data by phoneme patterns, stress patterns, vowel quality, or lexical semantics, enabling investigations of phenomena like vowel shifts, consonant clusters, and lexical diffusion.

In addition to the data component, LexSet includes an open‑source library—available in Python and R—that offers functions for loading, filtering, and visualizing lexical sets. Common utilities allow researchers to generate frequency distributions, compute phonological distance metrics, and produce heat maps of dialectal variation. The library is compatible with major corpus formats and integrates with tools such as NLTK, spaCy, and Phon.

LexSet is distributed under a permissive license, encouraging community contributions of additional language data and extensions of its analytical capabilities. It has been employed in academic publications on historical linguistics, sociophonetics, and computational lexical semantics, as well as in educational resources for teaching phonological analysis.