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5. Lexicon

What the Lexicon is

The Lexicon is SemantiK Architect’s vocabulary layer: the words (and key linguistic properties) the system needs to express meaning in a specific language. It is designed to support 300+ languages without becoming a single unmaintainable dictionary.

Core principles

  • Grounded meaning: entries are traced back to Wikidata QIDs so terms stay anchored to stable identifiers (provenance + alignment).
  • Usage-based sharding: vocabulary is split into domain shards so the engine can load only what it needs for the current context (instead of loading “everything”).
  • Strict validation: every entry must follow a schema so generation doesn’t fail because a required property (e.g., grammatical gender) is missing.

How it’s organized (human-friendly mental model)

  • One namespace per language, using ISO 639-1 two-letter codes.

  • Inside each language, the Lexicon is split into a few semantic domains (files) that match real generation needs:

  • core: “skeleton” function words needed to build any sentence (highest priority).

  • people: terms used for biographies (professions, relations, titles).
  • geography: countries/places and derived forms (adjectives, demonyms).
  • science: specialized terminology (grows over time).

Why this matters operationally (readiness scoring)

SemantiK Architect treats Lexicon coverage as a measurable readiness signal (“Zone B”): a scanner counts words in these shards to grade whether a language is data-ready (from “no files” to “production-ready”).

Typical workflows (high level)

  • Bootstrap a new language: start with core first (so basic sentences are possible), then add people/geography for biographies.
  • Grow coverage from Wikidata: use Wikidata as the upstream source for translations and QID provenance, then store locally in the right domain shard.
  • Fix “missing word” issues: add the missing term to the appropriate shard (often people for biographies), keeping schema-valid entries.