Organizing the Lexical Items Approved by the Academy in a Thesaurus Structure

The lexical items approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (hereafter called the Academy) lack a proper tree or thesaurus structure despite being originally selected in clusters from foreign languages. A semantic network viewpoint not only helps detect easily the gaps among the Persian equivalents selected for foreign words but also delineates the semantic relations among the equivalents provided. The semantic network approach provides lexicologists with a new tool for selecting or coining Persian equivalents for foreign words and organizing them into relevant structures. In this regard, a thesaurus structure seems to allow for the lexical items approved by the Academy to be organized in a systematic and structured manner. Webbased publication of such items structured within a conceptual network and their subsequent retrieval and analysis can in no way be compared with any of the existing traditional practices. The Chemistry Thesaurus compiled based on the chemistry terms approved by the Academy has not only created a small corpus in a specialized field but will also open new avenues to the generation of a large corpus of all the lexical items approved by the Academy. It is the objective of the present article to propose a model that employs the semantic network theory for both the initial selection of foreign words and the subsequent organization of the Persian equivalents formed in a thesaurus format.