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Developers Forum

Robert Oschler has created a discussion forum for WordNet developers at http://www.wordnetchat.com/phpBB2/

Related Projects

Semantic networks

  • The Global WordNet Association is a free, public and non-commercial organization that provides a platform for discussing, sharing and connecting wordnets for all languages in the world.
  • The Mimida Project, developed by Maurice Gittens, is a WordNet-based mechanically-generated multilingual semantic network for more than 20 languages based on dictionaries found on the Web.
  • MultiWordNet, developed by Luisa Bentivogli [email] and others is a multilingual lexical database, developed at ITC-irst, in which the Italian WordNet is strictly aligned with Princeton WordNet 1.6. The current version includes around 44,400 Italian lemmas organized into 35,400 synsets which are aligned, whenever possible, with their corresponding English Princeton synsets. The MultiWordNet database can be freely browsed through its on-line interface, and is distributed both for research and commercial use. Information on the distribution licence is available at the web site.

Web Interfaces

Local Interfaces/APIs

.NET/C#

  • Troy Simpson [email] has developed a C# interface to WordNet based on Malcolm Crowe's original port, but using WordNet 2.1. It requires the .NET framework and can be downloaded here.
  • Derik J. Palacino [email] has developed a C# interface. This project was built on the database files for WordNet 3.0 however the code was translated from version 2.1. It can be downloaded as a Windows binary or as source code.

COM

  • WordNet TreeWalk, an interface to WordNet based on tree-views developed by Bernard Bou [email], Lycée Champollion, France, has been updated to support WordNet 3.0. A COM component object that can also be accessed from COM-enabled languages (scripting languages, and C++).

Haskell

  • Hal Daume [email] has written a Haskell interface to WordNet 2.0 and 1.7.1. HWordNet is a purely functional interface to WordNet; it is written in pure Haskell and does not require the WordNet libraries to compile.

Java

  • The Java API for WordNet Searching (JAWS) is a high-performance interface written entirely in Java that supports the WordNet 2.1 and 3.0 database files. It was written by Brett Spell [mailto] and is compatible with Java 1.4 and later releases.
  • JWordNet is a Java interface to the WordNet library written as part of a larger research project at The George Washington University. It can be extended to pull data from both WordNet and other data files (e.g. Roget's Thesaurus). The project is an extension of John Didion's JWNL (see below) and also uses some of the concepts from Malcolm Crowe's C# interface.
  • A really cool Java/WAP interface that allows you to navigate WordNet from your mobile phone was developed by Joris Van den Bogaert [email].
  • Bernard Bou [email] has written WNJN, a JNI-compliant Java Native library that interfaces the WordNet database (1.7.1 and 2.0) to Java programs. It offers Java classes that interface with binary code (written in C++) and provides query and search funcationality.
  • A new version of JWNL (Java WordNet Library), written by John Didion [email], has been released. It is a Java API for accessing WordNet, and provides API-level access to WordNet data. It is pure Java (uses no native code), so it is completely portable, and all of the source code is available.
  • JWI (MIT Java Interface to Wordnet), developed by Mark Finlayson [email], supports Wordnet 2.0, 2.1, and 3.0. The latest version of JWI, 2.0, released for 2008, features a simple, streamlined, highly-extensible API and new high-performance backend code. It is written entirely in Java 1.5, and so is completely portable, and is distributed under a non-commercial license with full source code and a short users' guide.

OCaml

  • Ramu Ramamurthy has developed an OCaml API to WordNet that allows programs in the OCaml language to use WordNet forms and definitions.

OSX

  • William Taysom has developed an enhanced interface to the WordNet database specifically for Mac OS X. Download it from its SourceForge project page
  • Mike Ash has written LiveDictionary, a program that adds dictionary lookups to the Safari web browser on Mac OS X. The program uses adapters to provide access to WordNet 2.0.
  • A Mac OS X Server and Mac OS X front end for WordNet 1.6 developed by Erik Doernenburg. This application is a Mac-like front end for the WordNet database, and requires a separate download of a local copy of the database files.

Palm

Perl

  • A Perl extension module for accessing and manipulating WordNet has been developed by Dan Brian [email]. This module allows access to the Wordnet lexicon from Perl applications, as well as manipulation and extension of the lexicon.
  • Dan Brian [email] has also developed a lightweight Perl module that does a fast binary serach of the indexes. It takes a sense key (as used in the sense index) or a keyword and returns synset information from the corresponding data file.
  • Another Perl interface has been developed by Jason Rennie at the MIT AI Lab. It is object-oriented, grabs WordNet information directly from the database files and allows access to the entire WordNet lexicon.

PHP

  • A simple PHP interface to Wordnet 1.7.1 developed by Mike McDonald [email]. It allows PHP scripts access to all the WordNet API functions.

Pocket PC/Windows CE

Prolog

Python

  • Natural Language Toolkit has taken over the development of pywordnet. There is now a Python package, nltk_lite.wordnet, which incorporates pywordnet and which supports WordNet 2.1. It is included in NLTK Lite.

R

Ruby

Smartphone

SQL

  • [MySQL, PostgreSQL] A ready-to-use SQL database that unifies WordNet 3.0, WordNet 2.0-2.1, 2.1-3.0, 2.0-3.0 sensemaps, VerbNet 2.1, XWordNet 1.1 compiled by Bernard Bou [email] supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL.
  • [MySQL, PostgreSQL] WNSQLBUILDER is a Java tool by Bernard Bou [email] to build a unified SQL database (see above) from the WordNet, WN sensemaps, VerbNet, XWordnet standard releases.
  • [MySQL] Android Technologies, Inc. provides a MySQL version of WordNet 2.0 converted from the Prolog files.
  • [MySQL, dBase] wordnet2sql, developed by Richard Bergmair [email] is a system that converts WordNet 1.7 into MySQL and DB/2 formats.

Visual Prolog

  • Gildas Ménier [email] has converted the WordNet ISO Prolog files into a format suitable for use with Visual Prolog 6. His project page links to a downloadable version.

Windows

  • Troy Simpson has written WordNetDT, an alternate to WNB with some advanced search features.

XML

  • Bernard Bou [email] has also written a Java servlet to be hosted in a Tomcat server conainer which delivers XML output to queries. A DTD is provided to format XML query results.

Extensions

  • A user [email] has developed a cool little Perl interface that does a WordNet lookup.
  • Armando Stellato has written a plugin called OntoLing for the Ontology editing tool Protégé It allows the user to: browse linguistic resources, enrich ontologies with elements from these resources, and build new ontologies starting from existing resources. The WordNetInterface for this tool is based on the JWNL library, and is compatible with WordNet 1.6 through 2.0.
  • Bernard Bou [email] has written WNWA, a WordNet Web Application to be hosted on a Java Enterprise Bean Container (typically JBoss). It includes an Enterprise Java Bean that interfaces with the WordNet SQL database. Tomcat front-end servlets offer 4 renderings of query results: xml document, HTML, DHTML tree, hyperbolic tree. A demo site with limited hardware/bandwidth capabilities has been deployed, but its continued existence is not guaranteed.
  • Nuno Seco [email] of University College Dublin, has created a Lucene index of WordNet. It allows extremely fast and flexible searches of the WordNet database. The index, related libraries, and a short readme are available for download.
  • Tony Veale of University College Dublin is heading KNOW-BEST, which is attempting to use WordNet and other lexical ontologies as the generative basis for on-line language games. Playable samples of the games and information/papers related to their construction/research issues are available at The Creative Language Systems Group web site.
  • Keith Alcock has developed the WordNet Relationship Browser, a Windows program that allows a user to browse related words through the various links in WordNet. Each path thus created is given a score based on user-configurable weights. It is based on a version of WordNet contained in a .dll file, and is thus extremely fast.
  • Nuno Seco [email] of University College Dublin, has developed an Information Theoretic model for computing semantic similarity that does not require any resources other than WordNet. Georgios Tagalakis also provides a Prolog implementation.
  • Sandiway Fong [email] has released wnconnect, Prolog-based software which given two terms, does a breadth-first search for the possible paths between them in WordNet 1.7.1. There is a MacOS X GUI application with Sicstus Prolog embedded in it. It generates graphs of the connections. There is also a TTY version with just the Prolog and C files. You do need Prolog for this version.
  • The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) is an ontology specified in first order logic. SUMO mappings to WordNet 2.0 are available. Email Adam Pease for more information.
  • Paul Buitelaar, of DFKI-Language Technology in Germany, has developed CoreLex, an ontology and semantic database of 126 underspecified semantic types, covering around 40,000 nouns. CoreLex defines a large number of systematic polysemous classes, derived by a careful, semi-automatic analysis of sense distributions in WordNet.
  • A Resource Description Framework (RDF) representation of WordNet and ontology defining the terms used to represent the RDF version were developed by Sergey Melnik and Stefan Decker [email].
  • Steve Reed [email] has converted WordNet 2.1 to RDF (Resource Description Framework). It is available from his web site Texai: http://sourceforge.net/projects/texai.
  • Ken Litkowski [email] of CL Research provides an alphabetic verion of WordNet 2.0. There are 143991 entries in this dictionary, with a sense for each occurrence of an entry in a distinct synset. Virtually all information in WordNet has been captured, including the new domain relations, verb groups, and derivational forms.
  • Treebolic offers a hyperbolic representation of a hierarchy of data. A browser is provided which offers a hyperbolic view of WordNet words and links.
  • A semantic rhyming dictionary was developed by Doug Beeferman at Carnegie Mellon University. It uses WordNet to help sort the output based on how near in meaning a word is to a certain target meaning. He has recently added synonym and semantic sibling queries to the interface.
  • Doug has also developed Lexical Freenet, a Web-based thesaurus and word discovery/connection program.
  • WordNet::Similarity, developed by Ted Pedersen [email], is an open source Perl module for measuring the semantic distance between words. It provides a number of measures of semantic similarity and semantic relatedness based on WordNet. Given two synsets, it will return a numeric score showing their degree of similarity/relatedness according to various measures that all rely on WordNet in different ways. It provides support for estimating information content values from untagged corpora, including plain text, the Penn Treebank, or the BNC. The mailing list is found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wn-similarity/, and a bibliography of papers and publications that make use of WordNet::Similarity is maintained.
  • WordNet::Similarity requires a local copy of WordNet as well as the WordNet::QueryData Perl module, which provides a direct Perl interface to the WordNet database. Author Jason Rennie also has other WordNet tools on his site.
  • WordWeb 5,based on WordNet 3.0, is a free thesaurus/dictionary for Windows based on WordNet, developed by Antony Lewis.
  • SearchAide is an online expert system that assists novice searchers in the task of searching library databases and the Web. WordNet is used as a thesaurus, to help users find synonyms and alternate words for their search terms. Email Norm Friesen for more information.
  • Automatic Semantic Annotation of Texts, available via the home page of Fernando Gomez, is a small semantic corpus of 500 sentences, in which semantic roles, verb predicates and noun senses are resolved, using WordNet 1.6. The 500 sentences contain about 400 verbs.

Mappings