betekenistoewijzing

Betekenistoewijzing is a term used in Dutch linguistics and philosophy of language to describe the process of linking linguistic forms to meanings within a given semantic framework. It covers how a word, phrase, or symbol receives a specific sense or referent in context, and how that sense is represented in models such as lexical databases, ontologies, or formal representations.

In practice, betekenistoewijzing occurs at multiple levels. At the word level, it involves choosing the appropriate sense among several possibilities (word sense disambiguation). At higher levels, it includes the interpretation of phrases and sentences through compositional rules, as well as the annotation of texts in computational systems with semantic representations such as logical forms, frames, or feature structures. In computational linguistics, it also overlaps with tasks like semantic annotation, ontology alignment, and the construction of knowledge graphs.

Common approaches combine traditional lexical resources with corpus-based methods. This includes using dictionaries and ontologies (such as WordNet or domain-specific lexicons), mapping lexical entries to semantic networks, and applying distributional semantics or machine learning to infer meanings from usage. Frameworks for semantic role labeling, frame semantics, and other annotation schemes are frequently employed to formalize betekenistoewijzing in data.

Applications span information retrieval, machine translation, question answering, semantic search, and knowledge-base population. Challenges include polysemy, metaphor, domain shifts, cross-linguistic variation, and evolving language use. Efficient betekennistoewijzing often requires interoperable resources, clear annotation conventions, and robust evaluation.