GermaNet - An Introduction

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 6.0 contents (release April 2011):

Number of synsets: 69594

Of which adjectives: 5991
Of which nouns: 53753
Of which verbs: 9850

Number of lexical units: 93407

Of which adjectives: 8582
Of which nouns: 71844
Of which verbs: 12981

Lexical units per synset: 1,34

Number of literals: 85214

Number of conceptual relations: 81852

Of which has_hypernym/has_hyponym: 74945
Of which has_component_meronym/holonym: 3814
Of which has_member_meronym/holonym: 486
Of which has_substance_meronym/holonym: 556
Of which has_portion_meronym/holonym: 198
Of which entails/is_entailed_by: 22
Of which is_related_to: 1634
Of which causes: 197

Number of lexical relations: 3562

Of which has_antonym: 1587
Of which has_pertainym: 1706
Of which has_participle: 269

How do I get the data?

GermaNet 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.