Table of Contents
index.noun, data.noun, index.verb, data.verb, index.adj, data.adj, index.adv,
data.adv - WordNet database files (default file names)
noun.idx, noun.dat,
verb.idx, verb.dat, adj.idx, adj.dat, adv.idx, adv.dat - WordNet database files
(Windows)
noun.exc, verb.exc. adj.exc adv.exc - morphology exception lists
sentidx.vrb, sents.vrb - files used by search code to display sentences illustrating
the use of some specific verbs
(The remainder of this manual page refers
to database files by their default file names.)
For each
syntactic category, two files are needed to represent the contents of
the WordNet database - index. pos and data. pos , where pos is noun , verb
, adj and adv . The other auxiliary files are used by the WordNet library's
searching functions and are needed to run the various WordNet browsers.
Each index file is an alphabetized list of all the words found in WordNet
in the corresponding part of speech. On each line, following the word,
is a list of byte offsets (synset_offset s) in the corresponding data
file, one for each synset containing the word. Words in the index file
are in lower case only, regardless of how they were entered in the lexicographer
files. This folds various orthographic representations of the word into
one line enabling database searches to be case insensitive. See wninput(5WN)
for a detailed description of the lexicographer files
A data file for
a syntactic category contains information corresponding to the synsets
that were specified in the lexicographer files, with relational pointers
resolved to synset_offset s. Each line corresponds to a synset. Pointers
are followed and hierarchies traversed by moving from one synset to another
via the synset_offset s.
The exception list files, pos .exc , are used
to help the morphological processor find base forms from irregular inflections.
The files sentidx.vrb and sents.vrb contain sentences illustrating the
use of specific senses of some verbs. These files are used by the searching
software in response to a request for verb sentence frames. Generic sentence
frames are displayed when an illustrative sentence is not present.
The
various database files are in ASCII formats that are easily read by both
humans and machines. All fields, unless otherwise noted, are separated
by one space character, and all lines are terminated by a newline character.
Fields enclosed in italicized square brackets may not be present.
See
wngloss(7WN)
for a glossary of WordNet terminology and a discussion of
the database's content and logical organization.
Each
index file begins with several lines containing a copyright notice, version
number and license agreement. These lines all begin with two spaces and
the line number so they do not interfere with the binary search algorithm
that is used to look up entries in the index files. All other lines are
in the following format. In the field descriptions, number always refers
to a decimal integer unless otherwise defined.
lemma pos sense_cnt p_cnt [ptr_symbol...] sense_cnt tagsense_cnt
synset_offset [synset_offset...]
- lemma
- lower case ASCII text of word
or collocation. Collocations are formed by joining individual words with
an underscore (_ ) character.
- pos
- Syntactic category: n for noun files,
v for verb files, a for adjective files, r for adverb files.
All remaining
fields are with respect to senses of lemma in pos .
- poly_cnt
- Number
of different senses (polysemy) lemma has in WordNet. Note that this is
the same value as sense_cnt , but is retained for historical reasons.
- sense_cnt
- Number of synsets that lemma is in. This is the number of senses of
the word in WordNet. See Sense Numbers
below for a discussion of how
sense numbers are assigned and the order of synset_offset s in the index
files.
- ptr_symbol
- A space separated list of p_cnt different types of
pointers that lemma has in all synsets containing it. See wninput(5WN)
for a list of pointer_symbol s. If all senses of lemma have no pointers,
this field is omitted and p_cnt is 0 .
- sense_cnt
- Same as sense_cnt above.
This is redundant, but the field was preserved for compatibility reasons.
- tagsense_cnt
- Number of senses of lemma that are ranked according to
their frequency of occurrence in semantic concordance texts.
- synset_offset
- Byte offset in data.pos file of a synset containing lemma . Each synset_offset
in the list corresponds to a different sense of lemma in WordNet. synset_offset
is an 8 digit, zero-filled decimal integer that can be used with fseek(3)
to read a synset from the data file. When passed to read_synset(3WN)
along
with the syntactic category, a data structure containing the parsed synset
is returned.
Each data file begins with several lines
containing a copyright notice, version number and license agreement. These
lines all begin with two spaces and the line number. All other lines are
in the following format. Integer fields are of fixed length, and are zero-filled.
synset_offset lex_filenum ss_type w_cnt word lex_id [word lex_id...] p_cnt [ptr...] [frames...] |
gloss
- synset_offset
- Current byte offset in the file represented
as an 8 digit decimal integer.
- lex_filenum
- Two digit decimal integer
corresponding to the lexicographer file name containing the synset. See
lexnames(5WN)
for the list of filenames and their corresponding numbers.
- ss_type
- One character code indicating the synset type:
n NOUN
v VERB
a ADJECTIVE
s ADJECTIVE SATELLITE
r ADVERB
- w_cnt
- Two digit hexadecimal
integer indicating the number of words in the synset.
- word
- ASCII form
of a word as entered in the synset by the lexicographer, with spaces replaced
by underscore characters (_ ). The text of the word is case sensitive,
in contrast to its form in the corresponding index. pos file, that contains
only lower-case forms. In data.adj , a word is followed by a syntactic
marker if one was specified in the lexicographer file. A syntactic marker
is appended, in parentheses, onto word without any intervening spaces.
See wninput(5WN)
for a list of the syntactic markers for adjectives.
- lex_id
- One digit hexadecimal integer that, when appended onto lemma , uniquely
identifies a sense within a lexicographer file. lex_id numbers usually
start with 0 , and are incremented as additional senses of the word are
added to the same file, although there is no requirement that the numbers
be consecutive or begin with 0 . Note that a value of 0 is the default,
and therefore is not present in lexicographer files.
- p_cnt
- Three digit
decimal integer indicating the number of pointers from this synset to
other synsets. If p_cnt is 000 the synset has no pointers.
- ptr
- A pointer
from this synset to another. ptr is of the form:
pointer_symbol synset_offset pos source/target
where synset_offset is the byte offset of the target synset in the
data file corresponding to pos .
The source/target field distinguishes
lexical and semantic pointers. It is a four byte field, containing two
two-digit hexadecimal integers. The first two digits indicates the word
number in the current (source) synset, the last two digits indicate the
word number in the target synset. A value of 0000 means that pointer_symbol
represents a semantic relation between the current (source) synset and
the target synset indicated by synset_offset .
A lexical relation between
two words in different synsets is represented by non-zero values in the
source and target word numbers. The first and last two bytes of this field
indicate the word numbers in the source and target synsets, respectively,
between which the relation holds. Word numbers are assigned to the word
fields in a synset, from left to right, beginning with 1 .
See wninput(5WN)
for a list of pointer_symbol s, and semantic and lexical pointer classifications.
- frames
- In data.verb only, a list of numbers corresponding to the generic
verb sentence frames for word s in the synset. frames is of the form:
f_cnt + f_num w_num [ + f_num w_num...]
where f_cnt a two
digit decimal integer indicating the number of generic frames listed,
f_num is a two digit decimal integer frame number, and w_num is a two
digit hexadecimal integer indicating the word in the synset that the frame
applies to. As with pointers, if this number is 00 , f_num applies to
all word s in the synset. If non-zero, it is applicable only to the word
indicated. Word numbers are assigned as described for pointers. Each f_num w_num
pair is preceded by a + . See wninput(5WN)
for the text of the generic
sentence frames.
- gloss
- Each synset contains a gloss. A gloss is represented
as a vertical bar (| ), followed by a text string that continues until
the end of the line. The gloss may contain a definition, one or more example
sentences, or both.
Senses in WordNet are generally ordered
from most to least frequently used, with the most common sense numbered
1 . Frequency of use is determined by the number of times a sense is tagged
in the various semantic concordance texts. Senses that are not semantically
tagged follow the ordered senses. The tagsense_cnt field for each entry
in the index.pos files indicates how many of the senses in the list have
been tagged.
The cntlist(5WN)
file provided with the database lists the
number of times each sense is tagged in the semantic concordances. The
data from cntlist is used by grind(1WN)
to order the senses of each word.
When the index .pos files are generated, the synset_offset s are output
in sense number order, with sense 1 first in the list. Senses with the
same number of semantic tags are assigned unique but consecutive sense
numbers. The WordNet OVERVIEW
search displays all senses of the specified
word, in all syntactic categories, and indicates which of the senses are
represented in the semantically tagged texts.
Exception lists are alphabetized lists of inflected forms of words and
their base forms. The first field of each line is an inflected form, followed
by a space separated list of one or more base forms of the word. There
is one exception list file for each syntactic category.
Note that the
noun and verb exception lists were automatically generated from a machine-readable
dictionary, and contain many words that are not in WordNet. Also, for
many of the inflected forms, base forms could be easily derived using
the standard rules of detachment programmed into Morphy (See morph(7WN)
).
These anomalies are allowed to remain in the exception list files, as
they do no harm.
For some verb senses, example
sentences illustrating the use of the verb sense can be displayed. Each
line of the file sentidx.vrb contains a sense_key followed by a space
and a comma separated list of example sentence template numbers, in decimal.
The file sents.vrb lists all of the example sentence templates. Each
line begins with the template number followed by a space. The rest of
the line is the text of a template example sentence, with %s used as
a placeholder in the text for the verb. Both files are sorted alphabetically
so that the sense_key and template sentence number can be used as indices,
via binsrch(3WN)
, into the appropriate file.
When a request for FRAMES
is made, the WordNet search code looks for the sense in sentidx.vrb .
If found, the sentence template(s) listed is retrieved from sents.vrb
, and the %s is replaced with the verb. If the sense is not found, the
applicable generic sentence frame(s) listed in frames is displayed.
Information in the data.pos and index.pos files represents all of the
word senses and synsets in the WordNet database. The word , lex_id , and
lex_filenum fields together uniquely identify each word sense in WordNet.
These can be encoded in a sense_key as described in senseidx(5WN)
. Each
synset in the database can be uniquely identified by combining the synset_offset
for the synset with a code for the syntactic category (since it is possible
for synsets in different data.pos files to have the same synset_offset
).
The WordNet system provide both command line and window-based browser
interfaces to the database. Both interfaces utilize a common library of
search and morphology code. The source code for the library and interfaces
is included in the WordNet package. See wnintro(3WN)
for an overview of
the WordNet source code.
- WNHOME
- Base directory
for WordNet. Unix default is /usr/local/WordNet-1.7.1 , Windows default
is C:\Program Files\WordNet\1.7.1 .
- WNSEARCHDIR
- Directory in which the WordNet database
has been installed. Unix default is WNHOME/dict , Windows default is WNHOME\dict
.
All files are in the directory WNSEARCHDIR .
- index.pos
- database
index files (Unix)
- pos .idx
- database index files (Windows)
- data.pos
- database
data files (Unix)
- pos .dat
- database data files (Windows)
- *.vrb
- files of
sentences illustrating the use of verbs
- pos .exc
- morphology exception
lists
grind(1WN)
, wn(1WN)
, wnb(1WN)
, wnintro(3WN)
, binsrch(3WN)
,
wnintro(5WN)
, cntlist(5WN)
, lexnames(5WN)
, senseidx(5WN)
, wninput(5WN)
,
morphy(7WN)
, wngloss(7WN)
, wngroups(7WN)
, wnstats(7WN)
.
Table of Contents