ruby-wordnet

General Information

This library is a Ruby interface to WordNet®. WordNet is 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.

You can find out more about WordNet at <wordnet.princeton.edu/>.

This code was loosely based on the Lingua::Wordnet Perl module by Dan Brian, and uses a similar strategy of converting the WordNet data files into a BerkeleyDB database. The ‘convertdb.rb’ script in this directory can be used to build these databases from the WordNet dictionaries.

This module is intended to offer basically the same functionality as Lingua::Wordnet, and you should be able to use either (or both) to access and modify the lexical database interchangeably. This module attempts to remain fairly close in API to Lingua::Wordnet, so if you’re familiar with it already, you should be able to port things from one to the other with relatively little trouble. This module, however, uses BerkeleyDB’s transaction subsystem to allow safe concurrent access to the databases.

Many thanks to Dan Brian, who did most of the hard work. His efforts made my job mostly a matter of playing around.

Caveats

The database-writing portions of this code have not been extensively tested, and there are almost certainly bugs which will cause data to be lost or miswritten. You should make backups of changes you make periodically.

I would greatly appreciate feedback on any aspect of this software. Suggestions, feature requests, questions, design critiques, and bug reports are most welcome. Relevant patches are particularly helpful. I may be reached at .

Installation

If you use RubyGems, you can install via:

  $ sudo gem install wordnet

After you install the gem, you’ll need to convert the WordNet flatfiles into

You can also install as a site library via the Rakefile:

  $ wget http://deveiate.org/code/wordnet-x.y.z.tar.gz
  $ tar xzvf wordnet-x.y.z.tar.gz
  $ cd wordnet-x.y.z
  $ sudo rake install

More Information

There is a project page for Ruby-WordNet which can be found at: <deveiate.org/projects/Ruby-WordNet/>.

This library was developed as part of the FaerieMUD Project. For more information about the FaerieMUD project see <www.FaerieMUD.org/>.

You may also check out the latest development source for this module (which may or may not be different than the release) using Subversion from the following URL:

  svn://deveiate.org/Ruby-WordNet/trunk

Authors

Michael Granger

Legal

It is licensed under the modified BSD license. See the LICENSE file for details.

WordNet® is a registered trademark of Princeton University.

Lingua::Wordnet is code licensed under the following terms:

  Lingua::Wordnet
  Copyright 1999,2000,2001 by Dan Brian.

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the same terms as Perl itself.

$Id: README 102 2008-09-23 15:02:51Z deveiant $