What is it?

Given two terms, wnconnect is a program that finds and reports all possible connections between them in WordNet, a popular and freely-available synset (synonym set) network with semantic relations. WordNet is from Princeton University, see http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/.

Example: happy and sad

Here are the three shortest paths between the two terms, as reported by wnconnect. Synsets are enclosed in square brackets. The paths can be summarized graphically, as shown on the right:

happy/a is in [happy]
happy and  unhappy/a are antonyms
For [unhappy], see also [sad]
sad/a is in the synset [sad]

happy/a is in [happy]
For [happy], see also [glad]
glad and  sad/a are antonyms

happy/s is in [happy,pleased]
[happy,pleased] and [glad] are similar
glad and  sad/a are antonyms

[There are actually 6 different paths between happy and sad in WordNet 1.7.1. The full graph generated by wnconnect is shown here.]

Example: mend and tear

wnconnect was born because I was interested in seeing if an ontologically-based system like WordNet could be used to compute cases of Semantic Opposition in the sense of (Pustejovsky, 2001) involving change-of-state verbs in natural language. (This is a subcase of the famous Frame Problem from Artificial Intelligence.)
Consider:

(1) a.John mended the torn dress
b.John mended the red dress

In (1a), as a result of the event of mending a torn dress, we might reasonably expect dress to no longer be in state torn. In other words, semantic opposition should obtain between mend and tear. Compare this with (1b), where we might reasonably expect the dress to remain red.

Illustrated below is the shortest path between mend and tear in WordNet. This path contains an antonym link (shown in red) that encodes the semantic opposition.

mend/v is in [repair,mend,fix,bushel,doctor,furbish_up,restore,touch_on]
repair and  break/v are antonyms
bust in [break,bust] and bust/v related by verb.contact
tear/v is in the synset [tear,rupture,snap,bust]

[For completeness, note that the shortest path between mend and red (as a satellite adjective) is much longer and does not involve any antonym relations, see separate page here.]


Availability: Free. Now available in GUI and non-GUI versions for various platforms!

Graphical User Interface Versions (GUI):

Text-based User Interface Versions:


MacOS X Version
Software Requirements:

How does wnconnect work?

See the separate page here.


Windows Version
[Ported by Mans Hulden.]

Download: WNconnect-1.7.1-install.exe (11.1MB)

Installation Notes:


Linux Version
[Ported by Mans Hulden.]

Download: wnconnect-1.7.1-linux.i386.rpm (10.5MB)

Installation Notes:

Sandiway Fong
November 11th 2003
Updated: April 22nd 2005
Tucson, Arizona