LexicalItem
interface.
Minimally, a lexical item consists of a baseform. It can also be optionally specified for an ID and a citation form. The ID is useful to distinguish between different items stored in a lexicon, which have the same baseform (as happens in the case of homonyms like bank).
In addition, lexical items are specified for a number of
different features pertaining to their grammatical and semantic
properties. The features they can be defined for depend on their
category. Most such features are values of enumerated types; the
exception is the complements that a lexical item can have, which are
defined using a template-like representation. All features, including
complements, are defined in the {@link simplenlg.features} package, and
implement the {@link simplenlg.features.Feature} interface.
Different implementing classes provide getters and setters for the
different features, as well as boolean methods to check for the
existence of a feature value.
An abstract class implementing LexicalItem
is
provided, called Word
, with an additional abstract class ContentWord
extending Word
. The concrete classes extand either Word
or ContentWord
, the latter being the superclass for lexical
items belonging to the so-called open classes, namely adjectives,
adverbs, nouns and verbs.