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Last modified 15 months ago Last modified on 02/28/11 16:12:54

WordNet for Ruby

Ruby-WordNet is a Ruby interface to the ​WordNet® Lexical Database. 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.

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 the distribution 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 API-wise 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.

Note: to use this library, you'll need the original 'bdb' library by Guy Decoux, not the gem of the same name, which is unrelated. As Guy's site is now defunct, you can download the library ​from the Mercurial repo on this site, or try out ​a version that's being maintained by knu on Github.

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