SENSEIDX(5WN) WordNet™ File Formats SENSEIDX(5WN)NAME
index.sense, sense.idx - WordNet's sense index
DESCRIPTION
The WordNet sense index provides an alternate method for accessing
synsets and word senses in the WordNet database. It is useful to
applications that retrieve synsets or other information related to a
specific sense in WordNet, rather than all the senses of a word or col‐
location. It can also be used with tools like grep and Perl to find
all senses of a word in one or more parts of speech. A specific Word‐
Net sense, encoded as a sense_key, can be used as an index into this
file to obtain its WordNet sense number, the database byte offset of
the synset containing the sense, and the number of times it has been
tagged in the semantic concordance texts.
Concatenating the lemma and lex_sense fields of a semantically tagged
word (represented in a <wf ... > attribute/value pair) in a semantic
concordance file, using % as the concatenation character, creates the
sense_key for that sense, which can in turn be used to search the sense
index file.
A sense_key is the best way to represent a sense in semantic tagging or
other systems that refer to WordNet senses. sense_keys are independent
of WordNet sense numbers and synset_offsets, which vary between ver‐
sions of the database. Using the sense index and a sense_key, the cor‐
responding synset (via the synset_offset) and WordNet sense number can
easily be obtained. A mapping from noun sense_keys in WordNet 1.6 to
corresponding 2.0 sense_keys is provided with version 2.0, and is
described in sensemap(5WN).
See wndb(5WN) for a thorough discussion of the WordNet database files.
File Format
The sense index file lists all of the senses in the WordNet database
with each line representing one sense. The file is in alphabetical
order, fields are separated by one space, and each line is terminated
with a newline character.
Each line is of the form:
sense_key synset_offset sense_number tag_cnt
sense_key is an encoding of the word sense. Programs can construct a
sense key in this format and use it as a binary search key into the
sense index file. The format of a sense_key is described below.
synset_offset is the byte offset that the synset containing the sense
is found at in the database "data" file corresponding to the part of
speech encoded in the sense_key. synset_offset is an 8 digit, zero-
filled decimal integer, and can be used with fseek(3) to read a synset
from the data file. When passed to the WordNet library function
read_synset() along with the syntactic category, a data structure con‐
taining the parsed synset is returned.
sense_number is a decimal integer indicating the sense number of the
word, within the part of speech encoded in sense_key, in the WordNet
database. See wndb(5WN) for information about how sense numbers are
assigned.
tag_cnt represents the decimal number of times the sense is tagged in
various semantic concordance texts. A tag_cnt of 0 indicates that the
sense has not been semantically tagged.
Sense Key Encoding
A sense_key is represented as:
lemma%lex_sense
where lex_sense is encoded as:
ss_type:lex_filenum:lex_id:head_word:head_id
lemma is the ASCII text of the word or collocation as found in the
WordNet database index file corresponding to pos. lemma is in lower
case, and collocations are formed by joining individual words with an
underscore (_) character.
ss_type is a one digit decimal integer representing the synset type for
the sense. See Synset Type below for a listing of the numbers corre‐
sponding to each synset type.
lex_filenum is a two digit decimal integer representing the name of the
lexicographer file containing the synset for the sense. See lex‐
names(5WN) for the list of lexicographer file names and their corre‐
sponding numbers.
lex_id is a two digit decimal integer that, when appended onto lemma,
uniquely identifies a sense within a lexicographer file. lex_id num‐
bers usually start with 00, and are incremented as additional senses of
the word are added to the same file, although there is no requirement
that the numbers be consecutive or begin with 00. Note that a value of
00 is the default, and therefore is not present in lexicographer files.
Only non-default lex_id values must be explicitly assigned in lexicog‐
rapher files. See wninput(5WN) for information on the format of lexi‐
cographer files.
head_word is only present if the sense is in an adjective satellite
synset. It is the lemma of the first word of the satellite's head
synset.
head_id is a two digit decimal integer that, when appended onto
head_word, uniquely identifies the sense of head_word within a lexicog‐
rapher file, as described for lex_id. There is a value in this field
only if head_word is present.
Synset Type
The synset type is encoded as follows:
1 NOUN
2 VERB
3 ADJECTIVE
4 ADVERB
5 ADJECTIVE SATELLITE
NOTES
For non-satellite senses the head_word and head_id fields have no val‐
ues, however the field separator character (:) is present.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES (UNIX)
WNHOME Base directory for WordNet. Default is
/usr/local/WordNet-3.0.
WNSEARCHDIR Directory in which the WordNet database has been
installed. Default is WNHOME/dict.
REGISTRY (WINDOWS)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WordNet\3.0\WNHome
Base directory for WordNet. Default is C:\Pro‐
gram Files\WordNet\3.0.
FILES
index.sense sense index
SEE ALSObinsrch(3WN), wnsearch(3WN), lexnames(5WN), wnintro(5WN),
sensemap(5WN), wndb(5WN), wninput(5WN).
WordNet 3.0 Dec 2006 SENSEIDX(5WN)
