Extension and Use of GermaNet, a Lexical-Semantic Database

This paper describes GermaNet, a lexical-semantic network and on-line thesaurus for the German language, and outlines its future extension and use. GermaNet is structured along the same lines as the Princeton WordNet (Miller et al., 1990; Fellbaum, 1998), encoding the major semantic relations like synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, etc. that hold among lexical items. Constructing semantic networks like GermaNet has become very popular in recent approaches to computational lexicography, since wordnets constitute important language resources for word sense disambiguation, which is a prerequisite for various applications in the field of natural language processing, like information retrieval, machine translation and the development of different language-learning tools.