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.