GermaNet is a

semantic network A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, ...

for the

German language German ( ) is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and Official language, official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Ita ...

. It relates

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...

verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...

s, and

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...

s semantically by grouping lexical units that express the same concept into ''

synset In metadata, a synonym ring or synset, is a group of data elements that are considered semantically equivalent for the purposes of information retrieval. These data elements are frequently found in different metadata registries. Although a group ...

s'' and by defining

semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

relations between these synsets. GermaNet is free for academic use, after signing a license. GermaNet has much in common with the English

WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definition ...

and can be viewed as an on-line

thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym diction ...

or a light-weight

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

. GermaNet has been developed and maintained at the

University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Wü ...

since 1997 within the research group for General and Computational Linguistics. It has been integrated into the

EuroWordNet EuroWordNet is a system of semantic networks for European languages, based on WordNet. Each language develops its own wordnet but they are interconnected with ''interlingual links'' stored in the ''Interlingual Index'' (ILI). Unlike the origina ...

, a multilingual lexical-semantic database.

Database

GermaNet partitions the lexical space into a set of concepts that are interlinked by semantic relations. A semantic concept is modeled by a ''

''. A synset is a set of words (called lexical units) where all the words are taken to have the same or almost the same meaning. Thus, a synset is a set of synonyms grouped under one definition, or "gloss". In addition to the gloss, synsets are labeled with their syntactic function and accompanied by example sentences for each distinct meaning in the synset.V. Henrich, E. Hinrichs. 2010
GernEdiT - The GermaNet Editing Tool
In: ''Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation''. Just as in

, for each word category the semantic space is divided into a number of

semantic field In linguistics, a semantic field is a lexical set of words grouped semantically (by meaning) that refers to a specific subject.Howard Jackson, Etienne Zé Amvela, ''Words, Meaning, and Vocabulary'', Continuum, 2000, p14. The term is also used in ...

s closely related to major nodes in the semantic network: ''Ort'', or "location", ''Körper'', or "body", etc. As of version 15.0 (release May 2020), GermaNet contains: * Synsets: 144113 * Lexical Units: 185000 * Literals: 169521 * Conceptual Relations: 157921 * Lexical Relations (synonymy excluded): 12203 * Split Compounds: 98905 * Interlingual Index (ILI) Records: 28564 * Wiktionary Sense Descriptions: 29548

Format

All GermaNet data is stored in a

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

. The database schema follows the internal structure of GermaNet: there are tables to store synsets, lexical units, conceptual and lexical relations, etc. GermaNet data is distributed both in this database format and as

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

files. In the XML data, two types of files, one for synsets and the other for relations, represent all data available in the GermaNet database.

Interfaces

There are software libraries and APIs available for

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, and

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

. These programs are distributed under

free-software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...

s and provide easy access to all information in various versions of GermaNet.
GermaNet Rover
is an on-line application that can be used to search for synsets in GermaNet, explore the data associated with them, and calculate the

semantic similarity Semantic similarity is a metric defined over a set of documents or terms, where the idea of distance between items is based on the likeness of their meaning or semantic content as opposed to lexicographical similarity. These are mathematical tools ...

of pairs of synsets. It features visualizations of the

hypernym In linguistics, semantics, general semantics, and ontologies, hyponymy () is a semantic relation between a hyponym denoting a subtype and a hypernym or hyperonym (sometimes called umbrella term or blanket term) denoting a supertype. In other wor ...

relation and advanced filtering options for synset searching.

Licenses

GermaNet 15.0 (released May 2020) can be distributed under one of the following types of license agreements: * ''Academic Research License Agreement'': for the purpose of research at academic institutions. There is no license fee for academic use. Licenses are not given to individual students, and those seeking a license are required to talk to an academic advisor. * ''Research and Development License Agreement'': applies to non-academic institutions and research consortia. To be used strictly for technology development and internal research. * ''Commercial License Agreement'': applies to non-academic institutions and commercial enterprises. It permits technology development and internal research, as well as giving the non-exclusive right to distribute and market any derived product or service.

Alternatives

Open-de-WordNet is a freely available alternative to GermaNet which is compatible with

Linguistic Applications

GermaNet has been used for a variety of applications, including: * semantic analysisManuela Kunze and Dietmar Rösner. 2004. Issues in Exploiting GermaNet as a Resource in Real Applications. * shallow recognition of implicit document structure * compound analysis * analyzing sectional preferencesSabine Schulte im Walde, 2004. GermaNet Synsets as Selectional Preferences in Semantic Verb Clustering. * word sense disambiguationSaito et al., 2002. Evaluation of GermanNet: Problems Using GermaNet for Automatic Word Sense Disambiguation.

References

External links

*
GermaNet Rover online browser
{{Authority control German language Thesauri Lexical databases Knowledge representation Computational linguistics Online dictionaries