Lexicons

Lexicons can be defined as the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge. In simple terms, a lexicon can be thought of as a dictionary of terms that are called lexemes. For instance, the terms used by medical practitioners can be thought of as a lexicon for their profession. As an example, when trying to build an algorithm to convert a physical prescription provided by doctors into an electronic form, the lexicons would be primarilycomposed of medical terms. Lexicons are used for a wide variety of NLP tasks, where they are provided as a list of words, or vocabulary. Conversations in the concerned field are driven by their respective vocabulary. In this chapter, we will look at the steps and processes involved in building a natural language vocabulary.