WordNet (Cont.)
WordNet has been used for a number of purposes in information systems, including information retrieval, automatic text classification, automatic text summarization, and machine translation. A common use of WordNet is to determine the similarity between words. Various programming languages and environments are allowed to access WordNet via WordNet APIs.
| The figure shows an example of a wordnet graph, showing “temperature” and its hypernyms; the dumbbell of “hot” and “cold” and a satellite adjective. |
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Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept.
| WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it groups words together based on their meanings. However, there are some important distinctions. |
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- First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms—strings of letters—but specific senses of words. As a result, words that are found in close proximity to one another in the network are semantically disambiguated.
- Second, WordNet labels the semantic relations among words, whereas the groupings of words in a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern other than meaning similarity.