Thesaurus of Russian adjectives, organized into an array of linearly ordered groups of semantically close words, densely packed on the flat surface

Abstract

We split thesaurus of Russian adjectives into an array of semantic categories including words with close meaning. For compilation of the semantic categories we used Russian-English translations as the measures of proximity of word sense. The words can be divided into three domains, nearly equal in size, containing adjectives describing positive, neutral and negative qualities. Words in the groups are arranged in ordered lists, and these groups can be packed densely side by side. The whole thesaurus can be mapped onto a nearly circular patch of surface divided into three sectors. We conjecture that the emerging structure reflects representation of words in the human cortex.