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In ancient history, individual lives paralleled nations in their rise and fall, thereby reflecting their destiny; however, individuals were overshadowed by the glorified history of a collective entity. Therefore, familial or tribal traditions reflected in genealogies sometimes contradicted official history; a good example in this regard is 1 Chronicles 7:20–27. An initial reading of the genealogy contained therein focused on its literary and rhetorical implications; subsequently, its homiletical implications were extended. From a literary perspective, the ending of Ephraim’s genealogy with Joshua was the Chronicler’s special device that placed the first unsuccessful exploitation by Ephraim’s sons as an overture to the long history of conquest that followed. The scriptural text contextualised Joshua’s positive judgement regarding the Promised Land and his election as Moses’ successor. From a homiletical perspective, Ephraim’s genealogy generated insights about failure and tragedy and hope for the fulfilment of God’s promise, also likening the life of faith to a journey of perseverance. Research findings revealed similarities in the literary and homiletic meaning of Ephraim’s genealogy with that of Terah in Genesis 11:27–32. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Homileticians used to complain that biblical studies were more oriented towards historic-critical interest than towards preaching. Results of this research, which relate to the discipline of Old Testament Studies, show how a genealogical text can be relevant for homiletic and pastoral use in church ministry.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A Korean-Japanese-Chinese aligned wordnet, “CoreNet” is introduced. For the purpose of this paper, the term “wordnet” refers to a network of words. It is constructed based on a shared semantic hierarchy that is originated from NTT Goidaikei (Lexical Hierarchical System). Korean wordnet was constructed through the semantic category assignment to every meaning of Korean words in a dictionary. Verbs and adjectives’ word senses are assigned to the same semantic hierarchy as that of nouns. Each sense of verbs is investigated from corpora for their usage, and compared with Japanese translation. Chinese wordnet with the same semantic hierarchy was built up based on the comparison with Korean wordnet. Each sense of Chinese verb corresponds to Korean with its argument structure. The use of the same semantic hierarchy for nouns and predicates has several advantages. First, the surface forms of nouns and predicates share the similar one, especially in Chinese words. In case of Korean and Japanese, the typical formation is like “do+Noun” in English like “Noun+suru” in Japanese and “Noun+hada” in Korean. Second, the language generation from conceptual structures takes freedom to choose the surface form whether it chooses noun phrases or verb phrases. CoreNet has been constructed by the following principles: word sense mapping to concept, corpus-based, multi-lingualism, and single concept system for multi-languages. The overall flow of construction is based on dictionary-based bootstrapping, incremental similarity-based classification and manual post-editing. Among consideration points, the followings are introduced: multiple concept mapping, verbal noun, and concept splitting. For multiple concept mapping, a word is mapped into numerous concepts that comprise respective meanings of the word. For example, school is an “institution for the instruction of students.” The word school is mapped into three concepts such as location, organization, and facility. For verbal noun, a word that is a verb is assigned to concepts after it is transformed to a noun. For example, “write” is transformed to its noun form “writing” that is mapped into a concept writing falling under event. For concept splitting, every time inconsistency among nodes of concepts is discovered, a node may be added. What differs between CoreNet and NTT Goidaikei is that CoreNet features mapping between word senses (not just words) and concepts. These works have lasted since 1994.

In terminology, the predominance of nouns is an incontestable phenomenon. In Korean terminologies, this predominance of nouns is even more notable because the meaning and function associated with adjectives in Indo-European languages are often realized in noun form. However, the rarer adjectival terms are, the more they are used in restrictive, repetitive ways in specialized domains. Thus, it is important to distinguish the different senses of these terms. In this work, focusing on semantic characterization in terminology, we distinguish the different senses of adjectival medical terms by applying lexico-semantic criteria (L’Homme 2004a) and by classifying the arguments of the adjective into semantic categories (Bae et al. 2002). With this work, we aim to enrich terminological descriptions found in Korean medical dictionnaries by demonstrating empirically a method for distinguishing the different senses of adjectival medical terms. To achieve our goal, we used the KAIST corpus, composed of medical texts (1,500,000 eojeols), and a group of texts on various subjects (40,000,000 eojeols).