Lexical Gap

Lexical gaps, the absence of words or concepts in a language's vocabulary, are a significant area of research impacting various fields. Current studies focus on identifying and addressing these gaps, particularly in multilingual contexts, using methods like enriching computational lexicons with diverse kinship terms and adapting language models to handle out-of-vocabulary words in information retrieval. This research is crucial for improving cross-lingual natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, and for developing more robust and inclusive language technologies. Furthermore, understanding lexical gaps offers insights into linguistic diversity and cognitive processes, as demonstrated by studies using speech pause analysis to detect cognitive impairment.