lexicul

Lexicul is a term used in linguistics and computational linguistics to denote a structured lexical resource intended to model a language’s vocabulary and its semantic and morphosyntactic properties. The concept is presented as an alternative to the familiar term lexicon, with an emphasis on data organization and computational operability.

Origin and scope: The term is not universally standardized and appears mainly in niche academic discussions and open-source documentation. A lexicul typically encompasses lemmas, inflectional paradigms, part of speech tags, sense inventories, semantic relations (such as synonymy, antonymy, and hypernymy), usage notes, frequency information, and cross-language links. Some authors frame it as a modular, machine-readable layer that can interoperate across tools and languages.

Data model and implementation: A lexicul is usually modeled as interlinked records with unique identifiers, enabling relational and graph-based queries. Implementations may use open formats such as JSON-LD or RDF to facilitate interoperability and reuse in different NLP pipelines and language technologies. Emphasis is often placed on versioning, provenance, and clear licensing to support collaborative lexicography.

Applications: Lexicules can support natural language processing workflows, machine translation, lexical disambiguation, and language documentation. They are used to improve sense disambiguation, morphological analysis, cross-linguistic lexicography, and semantic search by providing rich, queryable lexical representations.

Relation to other concepts: The term overlaps with lexicon, lexical databases, and WordNet, but is distinguished by its explicit relational modeling and portability. Critics note that the term can be ambiguous and that established resources already perform similar functions, which can hinder standardization.

See also: Lexicon, Lexical semantics, WordNet.