sõnavõrkude

Sõnavõrkude refers to word networks or semantic networks in Estonian. It is a concept used in linguistics, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence to represent the relationships between words. In a sõnavõrk, words are nodes, and the connections between them represent different types of semantic relationships, such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy (is-a relationship), meronymy (part-of relationship), or association.

These networks are crucial for understanding how words acquire meaning through their connections to other words in a language. For example, the word "dog" might be connected to "animal" (hyponymy), "bark" (associated action), "cat" (antonymy or contrast), and "puppy" (hyponymy/age). Analyzing these connections helps in deciphering the nuanced meanings of words and their usage in context.

Sõnavõrkude are also fundamental in natural language processing (NLP) applications. They power technologies like search engines, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and question-answering systems. By mapping out the semantic landscape of a language, sõnavõrkude enable computers to process and understand human language more effectively. Creating and maintaining comprehensive sõnavõrkude is an ongoing challenge, often involving manual curation by linguists and automated extraction from large text corpora.