Mannen är faderns mormor: Svenskt associationslexikon reinkarnerat

Abstract

Svenskt associationslexikon (SAL; Lönngren 1992) is relatively new and relatively
little known Swedish thesaurus, compiled on the basis of corpora and some existing
Swedish monolingual lexical resources. SAL is organized as a strict lexical-semantic
hierarchy originating in an artificial top lexeme, where (primary) vertical ’parent’–
’child’ relations point to less central, but semantically closely related lexemes, and
(secondary) horizontal ’sibling’ relations form thesaurus-like word families. This
paper describes my work – in collaboration with the author of SAL, Lennart Lönngren
– on making an electronic version of the full SAL (comprising 71752 entries)
publicly available through Språkbanken at Göteborg University in a modern, standardized
format, which has been thoroughly checked for formal errors, enhanced
with additional information about lemmas and inflectional paradigms of entries, and
made browsable with a web-based graphical interface capable of displaying and
navigating the network structure of SAL.