hoofdlemma

Hoofdlemma, literally “head lemma” in Dutch, is a term used in lexicography and computational linguistics to denote the primary lemma under which a lexical item is indexed or presented in a dictionary or lexical database. It acts as the central headword (or lemma) for a set of related word forms and serves as the canonical citation form for the entry.

Unlike a general notion of lemma, the hoofdlemma emphasizes its role as the main label used for indexing and retrieval. In many languages with rich inflection, dictionaries select a hoofdlemma that may be the infinitive of a verb, the singular form of a noun, or the base form of an adjective; this ensures that all inflected variants link back to a single entry.

In computational resources, the hoofdlemma is the key form used for normalization: morphologically inflected forms like lopen, loopt, liep, liepen, gelopen all map to the hoofdlemma lopen. In tasks like lemmatization, the hoofdlemma is the target form to which surface forms are reduced; however, some systems may allow multiple candidate hoofdlemmata when lexical ambiguity arises.

Examples: Dutch verb lopen yields forms loop, loopt, liep, liepen, gelopen, all of which map to the hoofdlemma lopen. For the noun huis, with plural huizen, the hoofdlemma is huis.

Origin and context: The phrase combines hoofd (head) and lemma (lemma). It is primarily used in Dutch language resources and specialized computational linguistics literature; in English, the related concepts are usually referred to as headword or lemma, with similar practical implications for indexing and normalization.