ordbasis

Ordbasis is a term used in linguistics and lexicography to denote the foundational set of words from which other forms are derived. In Swedish practice, it can refer to the collection of base forms or lemmas that constitute a language’s core lexicon for analysis, education, or natural language processing.

In lexicography and computational linguistics, ordbasis functions as the core lexicon used to build dictionaries, morphological analyzers, and language models. Each entry typically corresponds to a lemma, which includes information about its inflectional paradigms, syntactic properties, and meaning. From these base forms, inflected or derived forms are produced through rules or data-driven processes.

Relation to related concepts is central to the idea of ordbasis. The ordbasis commonly includes lemmas, while stems may be used in stemming algorithms to group related forms. Lemmatization aims to map inflected forms to their lemmas, which aligns with the notion of an ordbasis as the set of canonical base forms.

Applications of ordbasis span both education and technology. In language teaching, a predefined ordbasis or high-frequency word list supports curricula and assessment. In natural language processing, a well-curated ordbasis underpins tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and information retrieval, often complemented by frequency data and domain-specific terms.

Limitations include its language- and domain-specific nature. An ordbasis may exclude dialectal variants, proper nouns, or recent neologisms, requiring periodic updates. It is not synonymous with the full vocabulary of a language, but rather with a practical core used for analysis, learning, or processing.

See also: lemma, lexicon, vocabulary, morphology, stemming, lemmatization, frequency dictionary.