Table of Contents
 
index.noun, data.noun, index.verb, data.verb, index.adj, data.adj, index.adv, 
data.adv - WordNet database files 
noun.exc, verb.exc. adj.exc adv.exc - morphology 
exception lists 
sentidx.vrb, sents.vrb - files used by search code to display 
sentences illustrating the use of some specific verbs  
For 
each syntactic category, two files are needed to represent the contents 
of the WordNet database - index. pos  and data. pos , where pos  is noun 
, verb , adj  and adv .  The other auxiliary files are used by the WordNet 
library's searching functions and are needed to run the various WordNet 
browsers. 
 Each index file is an alphabetized list of all the words found 
in WordNet in the corresponding part of speech.  On each line, following 
the word, is a list of byte offsets (synset_offset s) in the corresponding 
data file, one for each synset containing the word. Words in the index 
file are in lower case only, regardless of how they were entered in the 
lexicographer files.  This folds various orthographic representations of 
the word into one line enabling database searches to be case insensitive. 
 See wninput(5WN)
 for a detailed description of the lexicographer files 
 A data file for a syntactic category contains information corresponding 
to the synsets that were specified in the lexicographer files, with relational 
pointers resolved to synset_offset s. Each line corresponds to a synset. 
 Pointers are followed and hierarchies traversed by moving from one synset 
to another via the synset_offset s.   
 The exception list files, pos .exc 
, are used to help the morphological processor find base forms from irregular 
inflections. 
 The files sentidx.vrb  and sents.vrb  contain sentences illustrating 
the use of specific senses of some verbs.  These files are used by the 
searching software in response to a request for verb sentence frames.  
Generic sentence frames are displayed when an illustrative sentence is 
not present. 
 The various database files are in ASCII formats that are 
easily read by both humans and machines.  All fields, unless otherwise 
noted, are separated by one space character, and all lines are terminated 
by a newline character.  Fields enclosed in italicized square brackets 
may not be present. 
 See  wngloss(7WN)
 for a glossary of WordNet terminology 
and a discussion of the database's content and logical organization.  
Each index file begins with several lines containing a copyright 
notice, version number and license agreement.  These lines all begin with 
two spaces and the line number so they do not interfere with the binary 
search algorithm that is used to look up entries in the index files.  All 
other lines are in the following format.  In the field descriptions, number 
 always refers to a decimal integer unless otherwise defined. 
 lemma  pos  synset_cnt  p_cnt  [ptr_symbol...]  sense_cnt  tagsense_cnt 
  synset_offset  [synset_offset...]  
 
 
- lemma  
- lower case ASCII text of word 
or collocation.  Collocations are formed by joining individual words with 
an underscore (_ ) character. 
- pos  
- Syntactic category: n  for noun files, 
 v  for verb files, a  for adjective files, r  for adverb files. 
 
All remaining 
fields are with respect to senses of lemma  in pos . 
 
- synset_cnt  
- Number 
of synsets that lemma  is in.  This is the number of senses of the word 
in WordNet. See  Sense Numbers 
 below for a discussion of how sense numbers 
are assigned and the order of synset_offset s in the index files. 
- p_cnt 
 
- Number of different pointers that lemma  has in all synsets containing 
it. 
- ptr_symbol  
- A space separated list of p_cnt  different types of pointers 
that lemma  has in all synsets containing it. See wninput(5WN)
 for a list 
of pointer_symbol s.  If all senses of lemma  have no pointers, this field 
is omitted and p_cnt  is 0 . 
- sense_cnt  
- Same as sense_cnt  above.  This 
is redundant, but the field was preserved for compatibility reasons. 
- tagsense_cnt 
 
- Number of senses of lemma  that are ranked according to their frequency 
of occurrence in semantic concordance texts. 
- synset_offset  
- Byte offset 
in data.pos  file of a synset containing lemma .  Each synset_offset  in 
the list corresponds to a different sense of lemma  in WordNet.  synset_offset 
 is an 8 digit, zero-filled decimal integer that can be used with fseek(3)
 
to read a synset from the data file.  When passed to read_synset(3WN)
 along 
with the syntactic category, a data structure containing the parsed synset 
is returned. 
Each data file begins with several lines 
containing a copyright notice, version number and license agreement.  These 
lines all begin with two spaces and the line number.  All other lines are 
in the following format.  Integer fields are of fixed length, and are zero-filled.
 synset_offset  lex_filenum  ss_type  w_cnt  word  lex_id  [word  lex_id...]  p_cnt  [ptr...]  [frames...]  | 
  gloss  
 
 
- synset_offset  
- Current byte offset in the file represented 
as an 8 digit decimal integer.  
- lex_filenum  
- Two digit decimal integer 
corresponding to the lexicographer file name containing the synset.  See 
lexnames(5WN)
 for the list of filenames and their corresponding numbers. 
- ss_type  
- One character code indicating the synset type:  
  
n     NOUN 
 v     VERB 
 a     ADJECTIVE 
 s     ADJECTIVE SATELLITE 
 r     ADVERB 
  
- w_cnt  
- Two digit hexadecimal 
integer indicating the number of words in the synset. 
- word  
- ASCII form 
of a word as entered in the synset by the lexicographer, with spaces replaced 
by underscore characters (_ ).  The text of the word is case sensitive, 
in contrast to its form in the corresponding index. pos  file, that contains 
only lower-case forms.  In data.adj , a word  is followed by a syntactic 
marker if one was specified in the lexicographer file.  A syntactic marker 
is appended, in parentheses, onto word  without any intervening spaces. 
 See wninput(5WN)
 for a list of the syntactic markers for adjectives. 
- lex_id 
 
- One digit hexadecimal integer that, when appended onto lemma , uniquely 
identifies a sense within a lexicographer file.  lex_id  numbers usually 
start with 0 , 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 0 . Note that a value of 0  is the default, 
and therefore is not present in lexicographer files.  
- p_cnt  
- Three digit 
decimal integer indicating the number of pointers from this synset to 
other synsets.  If p_cnt  is 000  the synset has no pointers. 
- ptr  
- A pointer 
from this synset to another.  ptr  is of the form: 
 pointer_symbol  synset_offset  pos  source/target 
 
 
 where synset_offset  is the byte offset of the target synset in the 
data file corresponding to pos . 
 The source/target  field distinguishes 
lexical and semantic pointers.  It is a four byte field, containing two 
two-digit hexadecimal integers.  The first two digits indicates the word 
number in the current (source) synset, the last two digits indicate the 
word number in the target synset.  A value of 0000  means that pointer_symbol 
 represents a semantic relation between the current (source) synset and 
the target synset indicated by synset_offset . 
 A lexical relation between 
two words in different synsets is represented by non-zero values in the 
source and target word numbers. The first and last two bytes of this field 
indicate the word numbers in the source and target synsets, respectively, 
between which the relation holds.  Word numbers are assigned to the word 
 fields in a synset, from left to right, beginning with 1 . 
 See  wninput(5WN)
 
for a list of pointer_symbol s, and semantic and lexical pointer classifications. 
- frames  
- In data.verb  only, a list of numbers corresponding to the generic 
verb sentence frames for word s in the synset.   frames  is of the form: 
 f_cnt    +    f_num  w_num  [  +    f_num  w_num...]  
 
 where f_cnt  a two 
digit decimal integer indicating the number of generic frames listed, 
f_num  is a two digit decimal integer frame number, and w_num  is a two 
digit hexadecimal integer indicating the word in the synset that the frame 
applies to.  As with pointers, if this number is 00 , f_num  applies to 
all word s in the synset.  If non-zero, it is applicable only to the word 
indicated.  Word numbers are assigned as described for pointers. Each f_num  w_num 
 pair is preceded by a + . See wninput(5WN)
 for the text of the generic 
sentence frames. 
- gloss  
- Each synset contains a gloss.  A gloss  is represented 
as a vertical bar (| ), followed by a text string that continues until 
the end of the line.  The gloss may contain a definition, one or more example 
sentences, or both. 
Senses in WordNet are generally ordered 
from most to least frequently used, with the most common sense numbered 
1 .  Frequency of use is determined by the number of times a sense is tagged 
in the various semantic concordance texts.  Senses that are not semantically 
tagged follow the ordered senses.  The tagsense_cnt  field for each entry 
in the index.pos  files indicates how many of the senses in the list have 
been tagged.
 The  cntlist(5WN)
 file provided with the database lists the 
number of times each sense is tagged in the semantic concordances.  The 
data from cntlist  is used by grind(1WN)
 to order the senses of each word. 
 When the index .pos  files are generated, the synset_offset s are output 
in sense number order, with sense 1 first in the list.  Senses with the 
same number of semantic tags are assigned unique but consecutive sense 
numbers.  The WordNet  OVERVIEW 
  search displays all senses of the specified 
word, in all syntactic categories, and indicates which of the senses are 
represented in the semantically tagged texts.  
Exception lists are alphabetized lists of inflected forms of words and 
their base forms.  The first field of each line is an inflected form, followed 
by a space separated list of one or more base forms of the word.  There 
is one exception list file for each syntactic category. 
 Note that the 
noun and verb exception lists were automatically generated from a machine-readable 
dictionary, and contain many words that are not in WordNet.  Also, for 
many of the inflected forms, base forms could be easily derived using 
the standard rules of detachment programmed into Morphy (See morph(7WN)
). 
These anomalies are allowed to remain in the exception list files, as 
they do no harm. 
  
For some verb senses, example 
sentences illustrating the use of the verb sense can be displayed.  Each 
line of the file sentidx.vrb  contains a sense_key  followed by a space 
and a comma separated list of example sentence template numbers, in decimal. 
 The file sents.vrb  lists all of the example sentence templates.  Each 
line begins with the template number followed by a space.  The rest of 
the line is the text of a template example sentence, with %s  used as 
a placeholder in the text for the verb.  Both files are sorted alphabetically 
so that the sense_key  and template sentence number can be used as indices, 
via binsrch(3WN)
, into the appropriate file. 
 When a request for  FRAMES 
  is made, the WordNet search code looks for the sense in sentidx.vrb . 
 If found, the sentence template(s) listed is retrieved from sents.vrb 
, and the %s  is replaced with the verb.  If the sense is not found, the 
applicable generic sentence frame(s) listed in frames  is displayed.  
Information in the data.pos  and index.pos  files represents all of the 
word senses and synsets in the WordNet database. The word , lex_id , and 
lex_filenum  fields together uniquely identify each word sense in WordNet. 
 These can be encoded in a sense_key  as described in senseidx(5WN)
. Each 
synset in the database can be uniquely identified by combining the synset_offset 
 for the synset with a code for the syntactic category (since it is possible 
for synsets in different data.pos  files to have the same synset_offset 
). 
 The WordNet system provide both command line and window-based browser 
interfaces to the database.  Both interfaces utilize a common library of 
search and morphology code.  The source code for the library and interfaces 
is included in the WordNet package.  See wnintro(3WN)
 for an overview of 
the WordNet source code.  
- 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 
. 
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WordNet\3.0\WNHome  
- Base directory 
for WordNet.  Default is C:\Program Files\WordNet\3.0 . 
- index.pos   
- database 
index files 
- data.pos   
- database data files 
- *.vrb  
- files of sentences illustrating 
the use of verbs 
- pos .exc  
- morphology exception lists 
grind(1WN)
, 
wn(1WN)
, wnb(1WN)
, wnintro(3WN)
, binsrch(3WN)
, wnintro(5WN)
, cntlist(5WN)
, 
lexnames(5WN)
, senseidx(5WN)
, wninput(5WN)
, morphy(7WN)
, wngloss(7WN)
, 
wngroups(7WN)
, wnstats(7WN)
.
Table of Contents