WordNet

[Lynne Murphy]

Victoria said:

> I have to confess that I know absolutely nothing about it.  Is it meant for
> people writing specialized dictionaries or glossaries from scratch?

WordNet is a thesaurus basically--it's just an electronic one.  It organizes
the lexicon into separate part-of-speech sublexicons, and within these they
are organized by different paradigmatic relations.  All the lexicons are
organized into 'synsets' (groups of near synonyms), and those synsets stand in
other relations to each other. The adjective lexicon is basically organized by
antonymy, the nouns by hyponymy (and some meronymy and antonymy), the verbs by
different kinds of entailment (and other things).

You can download a bunch of papers on WordNet from:
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

These papers are mostly revised versions of the papers from _International
Jrnl of Lexicography_ 3:4, which was a special issue on WN, edited by George
Miller (who's one of the key WN architects).

Bethany mentioned the 1998 book:
Fellbaum, Christiane (ed.).  1998.  WordNet: An electronic lexical database.
MIT Press.

Which is more updating of the IJL material, plus some good history of the
project, plus some applications of it.  Through the Princeton site you can get
to a huge bibliography on WN, most of which is related to computational
projects.  For some projects, it makes a good base lexicon.  (But since it's
not got syntagmatic relations, it's not so good for most computational
projects.  It's more about semantic storage than language processing.)

> Lynne:  when is the book you mention coming out?

The one edited by Bert Peeters?  I'm not sure.  Sent the proofs back months
ago, but Elsevier hasn't started advertising it yet.  It's in their CRiSPI
series (Current research in the semantics-pragmatics interface).

Lynne