A SWEDISH ASSOCIATIVE DICTIONARY

This unpublished full-scale Swedish dictionary is an attempt to solve the problem of organizing the lexicon of a language in a coherent semantic network. It has the structure of a tree-like (hierarchical) network, the nodes being occupied by words and the arcs corresponding to certain relations between the words. Every word is assigned one obligatory, qualifying, descriptor and one optional, modifying, descriptor. If a word has several meanings each meaning is treated as a separate lexical unit. The words can be presented, for example, in alphabetically ordered entries, each consisting of three fields: a) the keyword; b) its descriptor(s); c) words containing the keyword in its descriptor field.

Publication: A Swedish Associative Thesaurus. Euralex '98 Proceedings, Vol. 2, 1998, pp. 467-474.

The project described above, SAL, was carried out in the years 1987-1992. After that nothing happened until 2005. Since then, considerable progress has been made thanks to prof. Lars Borin at Språkdata, University of Gothenburg. He started by making the dictionary available on the web by means of Språkdata Lexicon Visualisation, which is a Java application, and he wrote an article about this work: Mannen är faderns mormor: Svenskt associationslexikon reinkarnerat.

But this is not the end of the story. Together with a collegue, Markus Forsberg, Lars Borin has supplied every entry in the lexicon with morphological information. This new version of SAL, now called SALDO, was presented at a seminar on May 7, 2008. A brand new interface was invented in May 2009, and the result is that now all three of us are working quite intensely on this web-based dictionary, which is being updated on a daily basis. Read more about this here.