WordNet (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/), is, according to their site:
an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.
We intend to use it for various things, some of which follow:
- To classify words so as to provide synonyms, antonyms, genericisms and BlankFillers, thesaurus like.
- To enrich ProseGeneration and LanguageParsing.
- To supply phrases with blanks in them which can be filled by BlankFillers.
The Perl implementation, Lingua::Wordnet, uses a pre-parsed version of the WordNet lexicon, which it stores in Berkeley DB databases.
The Ruby module uses these Berkeley DB databases, as they are much faster and better-suited to heavy usage.
To find out more information about the particulars of Ruby-WordNet, we suggest the the project page for the Ruby WordNet module, or browse the current code in the FaerieMUD CVS Repository. For more information about WordNet itself, the home page linked above is the best resource.
— AlexisLi? - 07 Dec 2001
— GedTheGreysHain - 10 Jan 2002 [Updated and linked to project page]
