With the first publication of this book in 1988, the centrality of the lexicon in language research was becoming increasingly apparent and the use of relational models of the lexicon had been the particular focus of research in a variety of disciplines since the early 1980s. This convergence of approach made the present collection especially welcome for bringing together reports of theoretical developments and applications in relational semantics in computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology and industrial research. It explains in detail some important applications of relational models to the construction of natural language interfaces, the building of thesauri for bibliographic information retrieval systems and the compilation of terminology banks for machine translation systems. Relational Models of the Lexicon not only provides an invaluable survey of research in relational semantics, but offers a stimulus for potential research advances in semantics, natural language processing and knowledge representation.
