A Complete Multilingual WordNet List by Language

by Samuel Chong (schong2@go.pasadena.edu)
Pasadena City College
(Last update: February 6, 2015)

What is WordNet?

WordNet is a lexical database that groups words into sets of synonyms called synsets, providing short definitions and usage examples, and records a number of relations among these synonym sets or their members. WordNet can thus be seen as a combination of dictionary and thesaurus. While it is accessible to human users via a web browser, its primary use is in automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications. Both the lexicographic data (lexicographer files) and the compiler (called grind) for producing the distributed database are available

Multilingual WordNet by Language and Their Licenses

Below is a table of multilingual WordNet by language and their licenses, as well as other pertinent information.  Please contact me if you have any additions.

Wordnets and Translation Applications

Concerning translation, wordnets can be used both directly as an auxiliary tool and as a lexical basis for machine translation, as distinguishing between multiple possible senses of a word is an important subtask of most NLP applications, machine translation amongst them.

In fact, machine translation is one of the most direct applications of word-sense disambiguation: if we are able to identify the correct semantic meaning of each word in the source language, this will allow us to determine with more accuracy the appropriate words that lexicalize it in the target language.

Currently, Google Translate uses wordnet data along with statistical machine translation method to improve its translation results.

Examples:

Finnish: http://teemapoint.fi/

Other Links

Princeton Wordnet of English (PWN)

Wordnets in the World

Open Multilingual Wordnet

Copyright 2014-2017.  Samuel Chong, Pasadena City College