
An Open Version of WordNet - syats
https://en-word.net/
======
Isamu
Wordnet is already open, I think the advantage of this is that it is being
actively maintained.

From Wordnet:

> Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and database
> and its documentation for any purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby
> granted, provided that you agree to comply with the following copyright
> notice and statements, including the disclaimer, and that the same appear on
> ALL copies of the software, database and documentation, including
> modifications that you make for internal use or for distribution.

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syats
Wordnet is like a dictionary in that it contains definitions and synonyms of
words. It goes beyond a dictionary in that it also records relationships like
hypernym (broader) and hyponym (narrower), which can be useful for
"understanding" (what ever that means) text. It is a graph, that connects
different senses (called synsets), and also senses to words. It used to be
released under some close license and poorly maintained, now there's a fork of
it on github to which all can contribute.

~~~
tasogare
Wordnet has a "gloss" field but it’s very lacking if used as a traditional
dictionary. Its value lies in the graph of synsets.

~~~
compressedgas
The problem with the gloss or example field is that it is per synnet and not
per (word, sense or synnet) pair as it would be in a normal dictionary.

This means if you try to use it as a normal dictionary the glosses tend to not
contain the word for which you are listing the senses.

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jatsign
An animated graph of wordnet links may help explain why it's useful:
[https://www.wordsapi.com/](https://www.wordsapi.com/)

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Bellamy
What exactly can you do/produce with this graph and connection of words? I
can't understand the benefits.

~~~
azinman2
It used to be used in NLP, but never to great success. Word embeddings are a
far more powerful way to achieve a lot of similar goals, but with easier
computation, easier scalability to other languages, and accommodation for
new/personal words that aren't (yet) in the dictionary.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I agree with you, sort of, but WordNet based systems can be explainable. Word
embedding (and sentence embedding, etc.) is great, but like deep learning
models is a black box.

~~~
azinman2
I wouldn't assume even that... "X was chosen because a matrix decomposition
suggested it was relevant" isn't so great either... WordNet is/was rarely used
as just a single hop, those hops are somewhat arbitrary to begin with, and
ultimately it never really materialized as a useful tool. If it can't be used
for anything, then there's nothing to explain!

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rohan1024
A fun way to access WordNet hosted by dict.org

    
    
        nc dict.org 2628
        DEFINE wn hacker
    

Don't think it's open though.

~~~
minerjoe
It's open. You can install your own copy locally.

Arch has an AUR dict-wn that does this. For those not using arch you can still
clone the PKGBUILD and see how it grabs and compiles and installs.

git clone [https://aur.archlinux.org/dict-wn](https://aur.archlinux.org/dict-
wn)

~~~
frank2
I remember installing the Wordnet database on my Arch Linux install 17 years
ago so I would have a dictionary I could use without internet connectivity.
Wordnet can be used as a traditional dictionary although it is not very good
compared to, e.g., the dictionary that comes with any Mac or iPhone.

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mark_l_watson
I have used WordNet for 20 years, off and on.

Cool that is was forked and effort put into the new version.

WordNet has a rich set of libraries in many languages to use the data. I
didn’t see anything similar on their github repo.

~~~
compressedgas
You can use the existing libraries for Wordnet with the version in WNDB
format.

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Yeroc
Is there a similar API with the etymology of the words? I played with this a
bit and it doesn't seem to cover this area.

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rrose
it... doesn't know the word "how"? literally like the second word i typed in.
it seems like this must have some holes in it?

~~~
kleiba
Function words are often considered less interesting form a syntacto-symantic
point of view. WordNet focuses on content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs).

