What is a wordnet?

A wordnet is a lexical database of a language that links words according to their semantic relations. The Princeton WordNet was the very first wordnet to be developed, and is frequently the model used to develop subsequent wordnets, in English and other languages. Other wordnets include:

• GermaNet: a German-language wordnet created by the University of Tübingen in Germany
• FinnWordNet: a Finnish-language wordnet created by translating the original English terms in the Princeton WordNet into Finnish
• BulNet: a Bulgarian-language wordnet created by the Institute for Bulgarian Language in Bulgaria

The unit of analysis in a wordnet is the synset. A synset is essentially a way of understanding the semantic relations of a word. Let’s look at the word “field” in the Princeton WordNet to better understand what this means.

If we search for “field”, we get the following entries:

Let’s just focus on the first entry:

If we click on the S, which stands for synset, we can see which sense relations (highlighted in yellow here) apply to “field”.

Clicking on each sense relation will show us examples for each:

To get a full sense of how wordnets work and how useful they can be for investigating semantic relations, play around with the Princeton WordNet (or others, if you have knowledge of other languages).