WordNet with Node.JS
Oct 20, 2020
WordNet is, well: a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept.
Here’s an example of WordNet lookup for the word “dog”.
A few notes:
- t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶’̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶c̶e̶p̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶”̶d̶o̶g̶”̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶”̶a̶n̶i̶m̶a̶l̶”̶,̶ ̶e̶x̶c̶e̶p̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶E̶n̶g̶l̶i̶s̶h̶ ̶l̶a̶n̶g̶u̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶t̶e̶x̶t̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶a̶v̶a̶i̶l̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶c̶i̶l̶l̶a̶r̶y̶ ̶d̶a̶t̶a̶s̶e̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶a̶v̶a̶i̶l̶a̶b̶l̶e̶.̶ My bad — this is the lexFilenum. “5” is “<noun.animal>”.
- WordNet is very liberally licensed and can be used in commercial products
- WordNet hasn’t been updated since 2005 (not that it has to be!)
So on to the good part: here’s how you can access it in Node.JS:
npm install wordnet-db
npm install node-wordnetThen:
const WordNet = require("node-wordnet")
const wordnet = new WordNet("../node_modules/wordnet-db/dict")wordnet.lookup('dog', function(results) {
results.forEach(function(result) {
console.log(JSON.stringify(result, null, 2))
})
})
Which gives output like:
