Talk:WordNet/Archives/2014

How active is WordNet?
I would be interested in any info about the activity of WordNet. The last publication was in 1998. The last wordnetforum post was in 2008, with the last announcement in 2005.

Is this project still the best one for this info? Are there other related projects that are more up to date?

dfrankow (talk) 17:05, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Background information on WordNet
An article from the New Jersey "Star-Ledger" that gives background information on WordNet, its developer (Professor George Miller), and its future.

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/news/stories/0122wordnet.html21

JMB
 * Link to article seems not to work anymore. 80.131.165.118 09:14, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

WordNet as an ontology
I think this page needs to focus more on WordNet being an ontology. The feature linguists and those in the field of NLP usually find most useful is the hypernym and hyponym relationships for nouns. This is also where most of the work was put into WordNet, which made it different than other dictionaries. There has been work in the other areas mentioned, but by far the biggest contribution from this resource is the "ontology" of nouns.

-has


 * This is an interesting remark, has. Could you give a reference to an article or a paper which illustrate your remark? Hirzel 08:57, 28 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Plenty of them, just Google for them. For example, the WordNet::Similarity Perl package contains a number of implementations of word similarity algorithms that uses WordNet as an ontology. --unkx80 18:10, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

API List
I've restored the section that refers to Princeton's list of recognized APIs after someone else removed it recently. I think it's appropriate to include the link for two reasons: first, people who are interested in WordNet APIs are more likely to choose to use one that has been recognized by Princeton, and second because Princeton's list is significantly larger (dozens of APIs versus five) than the ad-hoc one found here. If you can provide some reasonable justification for removing the link to Princeton's list then please provide it; however, at this point I don't see the logic in removing the link to the "official" list of dozens of APIs and leaving an ad hoc list of five whose only special significance is that some people cared enough to add them to Wikipedia. If anything, the ad hoc list should be eliminated and the link to Princeton's list should remain.

Anon -- February 13, 2008.

Wordreference.com
Wordreference.com uses WordNet extensively. Since it's a relatively popular site, perhaps it should be added in related projects and/or external links.

Kozmefulanito (talk) 16:38, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Anomic hierarchies
I had considerable difficulty making sense out of the second sentence in the following paragraph (the first in the section titled "Psychological justification"). I think it needs reformulation, but since I'm not sure what it means, maybe amputation would be the kindest cut.

''The goal of WordNet was to develop a system that would be consistent with the knowledge acquired over the years about how human beings process language. Anomic aphasia, for example, creates a condition that seems to selectively encumber individuals' ability to name objects; this makes the decision to partition the parts of speech into distinct hierarchies more of a principled decision than an arbitrary one.''

The paragraph appears to be saying that there are more or less good reasons for "hierarchies" in WordNet. The section in which it appears does not clearly make or establish such a claim, and I'm still wondering what anomic aphasia has to do with hierarchies. Also, of what is anomic aphasia an "example"? Of knowledge about how human beings process language? By studying aphasia, neurologists have acquired knowledge about how human beings process language - but aphasia is not that knowledge.

The "decision to partition the parts of speech into distinct hierarchies" is a decision taken by the creators of WordNet. The word "this" following the semicolon apparently refers to "anomic aphasia". So what the writer seems to be saying is that the creators of WordNet, when deciding to define "distinct hierarchies", based that decision on their knowledge that there is such a thing as anomic aphasia. I wonder if they did in fact do that? The writer may merely be offering his own justification for the "distinct hierarchies" systematics, no matter what the considerations were of the WordNet creators.

In any case, "more of a principled decision than an arbitrary one" is less of a justification, than a damning with faint praise. If the WordNet creators took anomic aphasia into account, then as far as that goes they took a principled decision, tout court. If they took an arbitrary decision (highly unlikely), then they took an arbitrary decision, tout court. If the writer is not sure what their reasons were, or what he himself thinks are justifications for "hierarchies" in WordNet, then he should say so clearly.

There are many competitive theories about what might be involved in "cognition", "speech" and "knowledge" (I am deliberately using scare quotes here). Hierarchies do not cut a large figure in each and all of these theories. Also, the (itself quite old) idea that inspection of "boundary issues" can contribute importantly to knowledge about "central issues" is nowadays widely accepted, and deliberately employed to guide research. A dysfunction such as anomic aphasia is a "boundary issue" inasmuch as most people are not afflicted with it. However, for over 150 years since the late 1700s, what was known about brain function was primarily derived from examination of soldiers with head injuries. Leibniz' regarded his idea of "the best of all possible worlds" as supported by considerations of mathematical boundary problems (maxima and minima).

Stuart.clayton.22 (talk) 00:37, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Extensions and Linked Data, Related Projects
This is only a partial list, a more complete version of which is maintained on Princeton's WordNet web site. Wikipedia isn't a link aggregator and including a partial copy of a list maintained by Princeton doesn't seem appropriate. I suggestion that these sections should be removed unless someone can provide a reasonable counter argument.

(anon) 6:40, 31 August 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.163.178.60 (talk)

WordNet & Wiktionary
Is it possible to relicense WordNet's database to GNU FDL for Wiktionary? —Tokek 03:31, 11 February 2006 (UTC)


 * BSD license would imply that, yes. --maru  (talk)  contribs 05:07, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * As explained on the user's talk page (on 04:06, 5 May 2006 (UTC)), this is a bad idea because the synonym-grouping makes the definitions very inaccurate, and overall Wordnet is a psychology or artificial intelligence project, not a sound dictionary project. —Centrx→talk &bull; 20:10, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

List of WordNet APIs
There are a number of "see also" and external links that point to products or sites that use or extend WordNet, including WordWeb, Wordnet.Net, TheFreeDictionary, Titiland Dictionary, and Online Synonymous Thesaurus. There are also some notable ones that are not mentioned. I propose to remove those individual product links and instead link to http://wordnet.princeton.edu/links#extensions which is the list of such efforts maintained by the WordNet group at Princeton. If that is too controversial, I will add some of those other projects to the external references instead.

Tono-bungay 21:06, 16 April 2006 (UTC)