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 might be viewed as an on-line thesaurus or a light-weigt ontology.
Germanet has been developed and maintained within various project at the 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 5.1 contents (Released 30 April 2008):
Synsets: 57776
Lexical units: 81773
Literals: 72057
1,42 Lexical Units per Synset
1,13 Readings per Literal
Lexical Relations: 12042
Conceptual Relations: 68997
How do I get the data?
GermaNet is free for academic users but you have to sign a licence.
To dowload licences and learn more about our "R&D" and commercial
licences, please go to the licence page.
How do I access the data?
Once you have signed the licence, you will get the data distribution
as an archive, typically sent as an e-mail attachment. The data are in
XML format, the DTDs which describe these formats are part of the
distribution.
There are currently two Application Programming Interfaces available:
You can download
the latest version of the Java API here.
Please note that the distribution does not contain the source code. To
obtain the source code, or if you have any other questions and remarks,
please contact
Marie Hinrichs.
To obtain Holger Wunsch's PERL API, please see:
http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~wunsch/germanet_api.html.
Both APIs reflect the structure of the most common version of GermaNet.
You get both APIs for free, but you are kindly requested to report bugs
to the developers.