Back to the Basic: Exploring Base Concepts from the Wordnet Glosses

There has been no consensus as to what constitutes a set of base concepts in the mental landscape. With the aim of exploring base concepts in Chinese, this paper proposes that frequently-occurring words in the glosses of a lexical resource such as the Chinese Wordnet can be seen as a candidate set of base concepts because the glosses use basic words. The present study identified 130 base concepts in Chinese. The Base Concepts in EuroWordNet were adopted as a reference for comparison. While only 44.6% of the base concepts identified in the present study have an equivalent in the set of Base Concepts of EuroWordNet, the other base concepts extracted by our gloss-based approach also reflect a certain degree of basicness. It is hoped that both the overlap and the difference between different sets of base concepts identified in different languages and by different approaches can deepen our understanding of the basic core in the mind. Additionally, it is also hoped that the set of base concepts identified in the present study can have computational as well as pedagogical applications in the future.