Related Work

NSM as discussed by Wierzbicka and Goddard in [GoWi2015a] is a linguistic approach for semantic analysis or, in other words, for the detection of semantics in spoken communication. A substantial difference to other semantic analysis methods lies in the fact, that the description of a complex concept is done in natural language without neologisms, formal operators, abbreviations etc.

The Longman´s Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDCE) [Long2014] contains 230,000 words, phrases and meanings and 165,000 corpus-based examples. In 1983 there were only 55,000 words in the LDCE. All definitions in the dictionary are based on the Longman Defining Vocabulary (LDV) of around 2,000 common words. We will use the words of the LDV also as a set of candidates for the Foundation Core Glossary (FCG).

With Semantography Charles Bliss as the author of [Bliss1949] and [Bliss1965] has created a practical tool for general language independent communication, especially in science, industry, commerce, traffic, etc. It is a non-alphabetical symbol writing system, readable in all languages for semantical education and based on the principles of ideographic writing and chemical symbolism. I.e., one can write complete sentences using Bliss Words (BW), and the reader can understand them without knowing the language of the writer. Charles Bliss has been motivated by the principle of Chinese characters being constructed as logograms. Bliss symbols have been developed over decades. Therefore, the set of symbols can be regarded as quite robust. Meanwhile, the Bliss community has gathered a set of approximately 6,500 Bliss words, which are composed from 20 simple lines and shapes. Among them, there are about 650 basic nouns, 960 verbs, 566 adjectives and 14 indicators like action, description, conditional, continuous form, definite form, future action, first person etc. We will show that Bliss symbols are very helpful for the decomposition of concepts, since the combination of Bliss Words into Bliss symbols allows to identify Semantic Compounds (SC) more easily. One of the problems with Bliss symbols is that they do not have brackets and therefore their semantics are not always clear.