= Ruby-WordNet

* http://deveiate.org/projects/Ruby-WordNet

== Description

This library is a Ruby interface to WordNet®[http://wordnet.princeton.edu/].
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 library uses WordNet-SQL[http://wnsql.sourceforge.net/], which is a
conversion of the lexicon flatfiles into a relational database format. You
can either install the 'wordnet-defaultdb' gem, which packages up the
SQLite3 version of WordNet-SQL, or install your own and point the lexicon
at it by passing 
{Sequel connection parameters}[http://sequel.rubyforge.org/rdoc/files/doc/opening_databases_rdoc.html]
to the constructor.

=== Usage

There are three major parts to this library:

[WordNet::Lexicon]   the interface to the dictionary, used to connect to the
                     database and look up Words and Synsets.
[WordNet::Word]      the English word entries in the Lexicon that are mapped
                     to Synsets via one or more Senses.
[WordNet::Synset]    the main artifact of WordNet: a "synonym set". These
                     are connected to one or more Words through a Sense,
                     and are connected to each other via SemanticLinks.

The other object classes exist mostly as a way of representing relationships
between the main three:

[WordNet::Sense]         represents a link between one or more Words and
                         one or more Synsets for one meaning of the word.
[WordNet::SemanticLink]  represents a link between Synsets
[WordNet::LexicalLink]   represents a link between Words in Synsets
[WordNet::Morph]         an interface to a lookup table of irregular word
                         forms mapped to their base form (lemma)

The last class (WordNet::Model) is the abstract superclass for all the others,
and inherits most of its functionality from Sequel::Model, the ORM layer
of the Sequel toolkit. It's mostly just a container for the database
connection, with some convenience methods to allow the database connection
to be deferred until runtime instead of when the library loads.

The library also comes with the beginnings of support for the SUMO-WordNet
mapping:

[WordNet::SumoTerm]      {Suggested Upper Merged Ontology}[http://www.ontologyportal.org/]
                         terms, with associations back to related Synsets.

This is only supported by a subset of the WordNetSQL databases, and there
is a fair amount of work left to be done before it's really functional. Drop
me a note if you're interested in working on this.


== Requirements

* Ruby >= 1.9.3
* Sequel >= 3.38.0


== Authors

* Michael Granger <ged@FaerieMUD.org>


== License

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