WordNet: An Electronic Dictionary for Humans and Computers
Christiane Fellbaum, Cognitive Science Laboratory, Princeton University

May 6, 5:00PM, Rockefeller 300

This talk provides an overview of the contents, structure and uses of WordNet, a large lexical database developed and maintained at Princeton. Conceived originally as a model of human semantic memory, WordNet contains information about tens of thousands of concepts that are lexicalized in English.

Because of its digital format, WordNet enables automatic systems to “understand” the meanings of words, to measure their semantic similarity, and to disambiguate words with multiple meanings. A powerful tool for Natural Language Processing, WordNet is used in a wide range of applications including information retrieval, question answering, machine translation and automatic reasoning and inference. New WordNets in dozens of languages open the door for cross-linguistic applications and studies of the lexicon.