What is GermaNet?
GermaNet is a lexical-semantic net that relates German nouns,
verbs, and adjectives semantically by grouping lexical units
that express the same concept into synsets and by defining semantic relations
between these synsets. GermaNet has much in common with the English
WordNet®
and can be viewed as an on-line thesaurus or a light-weight ontology.
GermaNet has been developed and maintained within various projects at the research group for General and Computational Linguistics
Division of Computational Linguistics
of the Linguistics Department, University of Tübingen
since 1997. It has been integrated into the
EuroWordNet (EWN), a
multilingual lexical-semantic database.
If you are looking for a more in-depth introduction of GermaNet and EuroWordNet, we recommend
Chapter 6.2 in Lothar Lemnitzer and Claudia Kunze: Computerlexikographie. Gunter Narr Verlag 2007.
You can download this text
(note that this text is in German). You can also
purchase the book.
For more detailed research papers related to GermaNet, please have a look at the publications section of this website.
Current Size of GermaNet
The following is an up-to-date statistics of GermaNet's version 5.2 contents (release December 2009):
- Number of literals: 76981
- Of which adjectives: 7650
- Of which nouns: 60851
- Of which verbs: 8480
- Readings per literal: 1,10
- Number of synsets: 61575
- Of which adjectives: 5550
- Of which nouns: 46735
- Of which verbs: 9290
- Number of lexical units: 84859
- Of which adjectives: 8130
- Of which nouns: 64315
- Of which verbs: 12414
- Lexical units per synset: 1,38
- Number of conceptual relations: 73624
- Of which hyperonymy/hyponymy: 66887
- Of which holonymy: 4152
- Of which meronymy: 1005
- Of which entailment/entailed: 21
- Of which association: 1358
- Of which causation: 201
- Number of lexical relations: 26564
- Of which synonymy: 23284
- Of which antonymy: 1579
- Of which pertonymy: 1701
How do I get the data?
The current version of GermaNet is 5.2 (December 2009). It is free for academic
users but you have to sign a licence.
To dowload the licence and learn more about our "R&D" and commercial
licences, please go to the licence page.
Significant Changes to the Content Compared to Version 5.1
- Starting with this version, GermaNet is a complete graph. There is exactly one top node (GNROOT)
from which all previous "unique beginners" are hyponyms (the synsets in file adj.Pertonym.xml are
completely integrated into the graph also).
- Starting with this version, orthographic variants are not listed as separate lexical units. A
lexical unit can have further optional variants besides the main form, which characterize the
differences between the old and the new German spellings:
- orthForm: this is the main form, which indicates the new German spelling and which is always
defined
- orthVar: this is an orthographic variant of the main form, which is also permissible in the new
German spelling
- oldOrthForm: the main form in the old German spelling
- oldOrthVar: an orthographic variant that was permissible in the old German spelling
- There are no more arg1 and arg2 relations.
- New synsets, lexical units, relations, and frames were added.
Technical Changes Compared to Version 5.1
- In this version, the working copy of the GermaNet data, that was stored as "lexicographers
files" up to now, has been moved to a relational database.
- The data structure for the linguistic objects (synsets, lexical units) has been updated to reflect
the changes made to the content.