This is the README file for WordNet 2.1 1. About WordNet WordNet was developed at Princeton University's Cognitive Science Laboratory under the direction of George Miller, James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus. Over the years many linguists, lexicographers, students, and software engineers have contributed to the project. WordNet is an online lexical reference system. Word forms in WordNet are represented in their familiar orthography; word meanings are represented by synonym sets (synsets) - lists of synonymous word forms that are interchangeable in some context. Two kinds of relations are recognized: lexical and semantic. Lexical relations hold between word forms; semantic relations hold between word meanings. To learn more about WordNet, the book "WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database," containing an updated version of "Five Papers on WordNet" and additional papers by WordNet users, is available from MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=026206197X 2. The WordNet Web Site We maintain a Web site at: http://wordnet.princeton.edu Information about WordNet, access to our online interface, and the various WordNet packages that you can download are available from our web site. All of the software documentation is available online, as well as a FAQ. On this site we also have information about other applications that use WordNet. If you have an application that you would like included, please send e-mail to the above address. 3. Contacting Us Ongoing deveopment work and WordNet related projects are done by a small group of researchers, lexicographers, and systems programmers. Since our resources are VERY limited, we request that you please confine correspondence to WordNet topics only. Please check the documentation, FAQ, and other resources for the answer to your question or problem before contacting us. If you have trouble installing or downloading WordNet, have a bug to report, or any other problem, please refer to the online FAQ file first. If you can heal thyself, please do so. The FAQ will be updated over time. And if you do find a previously unreported problem, please use our Bug Report Form: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/bugsubmit.pl When reporting a problem, please be as specific as possible, stating the computer platform you are using, which interface you are using, and the exact error. The more details you can provide, the more likely it is that you will get an answer. There is a WordNet user discussion group mailing list that we invite our users to join. Users use this list to ask questions of one another, announce extensions to WordNet that they've developed, and other topics of general usefulness to the user community. Information on joining the user discussion list, reporting bugs and other contact information is in found on our website at: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/contact 4. Current Release WordNet Version 2.1 is the latest version available for download. Two basic database packages are available - one for Windows and one for Unix platforms (including Mac OS X). See the file ChangeLog (Unix) or CHANGES.txt (Windows) for a list of changes from version 2.0. WordNet packages can either be downloaded from our web site via: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/obtain The Windows package is a self-extracting archive that installs itself when you double-click on it. With Version 2.1, we have changed the Unix package to a GNU Autotools package. The WordNet browser makes use of the open source Tcl and Tk packages. Many systems come with either or both pre-installed. If your system doesn't (some systems have Tcl installed, but not Tk) Tcl/Tk can be downloaded from: http://www.tcl.tk/ Tcl and Tk must be installed BEFORE you compile WordNet. You must also have a C compiler before installing Tcl/Tk or WordNet. WordNet has been built and tested with the GNU gcc compiler. This is pre-installed on most Unix systems, and can be downloaded from: http://gcc.gnu.org/ See the file INSTALL for detailed WordNet installation instructions.