GermaNet

GermaNet is a semantic network for the German language. It relates nouns, verbs, and adjectives semantically by grouping lexical units that express the same concept into synsets and by defining semantic relations between these synsets.{{cite book|author=Petra Storjohann|title=Lexical-semantic relations: theoretical and practical perspectives|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OYBWObJ547AC&pg=PA165|accessdate=16 November 2011|date=23 June 2010|publisher=John Benjamins Publishing Company|isbn=978-90-272-3138-3|pages=165–}} GermaNet is free for academic use, after signing a license. GermaNet shares much in common with the English WordNet and can be viewed as an online thesaurus or a light-weight ontology.{{Cite journal|last1=Kunze|first1=Claudia|last2=Lemnitzer|first2=Lothar|title=GermaNet – representation, visualization, application|journal=Proceedings of LREC 2002|year=2002|url=https://aclanthology.org/L02-1073/|access-date=1 January 2025}} GermaNet has been developed and maintained at the University of Tübingen since 1997 within the research group for General and Computational Linguistics. It has been integrated into the EuroWordNet, a multilingual lexical-semantic database.{{Cite web|url=https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/142806|title=GermaNet - an Introduction|website=uni-tuebingen.de|accessdate=October 1, 2020}}

Database

=Contents=

GermaNet partitions the lexical space into a set of concepts that are interlinked by semantic relations. A semantic concept is modeled by a synset. 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. [http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/264_Paper.pdf GernEdiT - The GermaNet Editing Tool]. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation. Just as in WordNet, for each word category the semantic space is divided into a number of semantic fields 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 relational database. 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 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.{{Cite web|url=https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/142817|title=Data format|accessdate=October 1, 2020}}

Interfaces

There are software libraries and APIs available for Java, Python, JavaScript, and Perl.{{Cite web|url=https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/142818|title=Applications and Tools|website=uni-tuebingen.de|accessdate=October 1, 2020}}{{Cite web|url=https://metacpan.org/pod/GermaNet::Flat|title=GermaNet::Flat|website=metacpan.org|accessdate=October 1, 2020}} These programs are distributed under free-software licenses and provide easy access to all information in various versions of GermaNet.

[https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/rover 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 of pairs of synsets. It features visualizations of the hypernym 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:{{Cite web|url=https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/142828|title=Licenses|website=uni-tuebingen.de|access-date=October 1, 2020}}

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 WordNet.{{Cite web|url=https://github.com/hdaSprachtechnologie/odenet|title=GitHub - hdaSprachtechnologie/odenet: Open German WordNet|date=November 14, 2019|accessdate=November 20, 2019|via=GitHub}}

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.