Dear all,
as David encouraged, I'd like to follow up on our most recent discussion on using sense recursion via email.
We've talked about this with Michal MÄchura and Michal came with what I consider an excellent alternative to this problem. Where lexicographers would want to encode a two-level sense structure, they could use the labels as a kind of tags to group related senses. Not only that this would avoid the needs for any additional hierarchy (not to talk about recursion, which would be an extrapolation ad absurdum), but it also enables what any such hierarchy prevents, namely several, possibly orthogonal, groupings of senses. To this point, I think it is important to realize that:
(1) the hierarchy actually encodes similarity of senses, i.e. to say that some senses are closer to each other than some other ones
(2) there is very limited agreement on this similarity
(3) there are many possible way how this similarity can be defined and seen, allowing this means being closer to how language/word senses work
(4) the fact that it was encoded in a hierarchical way that only allows one-dimensional structure merely comes from the limits of a printed dictionary
(5) this alternative solution therefore enables all this, and much more, if needed, without introducing additional complexity.
I think that the labels generally could use a similar notation that David mentioned for PoS tagging, with prefix denoting type of label, e.g. "sensegroup:1" or "sensegroup:etymology1" and similar but that is to be discussed.
All the best
MilosÂ