Goal

WordNet is a lexical database for English that has been widely adopted in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics for a variety of practical applications. Since WordNet was designed as a lexical database, it exhibits some limitations when used for knowledge processing applications. Often one needs to retrieve words that are topically related, but the links necessary for that operation are not available in WordNet. The key idea of the Extended WordNet project was to exploit the rich information contained in the definitional glosses that is now used primarily by humans to identify correctly the meaning of words. Our intent is to automatically (1) syntactically parse the glosses, (2) transform glosses into logical forms and (3) tag semantically the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs of the glosses. This increases the connectivity between synsets and provides computer access to a broader context for each concept.

Status

The Extended Wordnet is an ongoing project. Future versions of Extended WordNet will be made available.

Applications

The Extended WordNet may be used as a Core Knowledge Base for applications such as Question Answering, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Summarization, Natural Language Generation, Inferences, and other knowledge intensive applications. The glosses contain a part of the world knowledge since they define the most common concepts of the English language.

Sponsor

The Extended WordNet project is funded by the National Science Foundation. Professor Dan Moldovan is the Principal Investigator and Professor Sanda Harabagiu is the Co-PI.