vshulman / rwordnet

A pure Ruby interface to the WordNet database

A pure Ruby interface to WordNet

About

This library implements a pure Ruby interface to the WordNet lexical/semantic database. Unlike existing ruby bindings, this one doesn't require you to convert the original WordNet database into a new database format; instead it can work directly on the database that comes with WordNet.

If you're doing something data-intensive you will achieve much better performance with Michael Granger's Ruby-WordNet, since it converts the WordNet database into a BerkelyDB file for quicker access. In writing rwordnet, I've focused more on usability and ease of installation ( gem install rwordnet ) at the expense of some performance. Use at your own risk, etc.

Installation

One of the chief benefits of rwordnet over Ruby-WordNet is how easy it is to install:

gem install gemcutter  # These two steps are only necessary if you haven't
gem tumble             # yet installed the gemcutter tools
gem install rwordnet

That's it! rwordnet comes bundled with the WordNet database which it uses by default, so there's absolutely nothing else to download, install, or configure. Of course, if you want to use your own WordNet installation, that's easy too -- just set the path to WordNet's database files before using the library (see examples below).

Usage

The other benefit of rwordnet over Ruby-WordNet is that it's so much easier (IMHO) to use.

As a quick example, consider finding all of the noun glosses for a given word:

require 'rubygems'
require 'wordnet'

index = WordNet::NounIndex.instance
lemma = index.find("fruit")
lemma.synsets.each { |synset| puts synset.gloss }

...or all of the glosses, period:

lemmas = WordNet::WordNetDB.find("fruit")
synsets = lemmas.map { |lemma| lemma.synsets }
words = synsets.flatten
words.each { |word| puts word.gloss }

Have your own WordNet database that you've marked up with extra attributes and whatnot? No problem:

require 'rubygems'
require 'wordnet'

include WordNet
WordNetDB.path = "/path/to/WordNet-3.0"
lemmas = WordNetDB.find("fruit")
...