Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database

WordNet is perhaps the most important and widely used lexical resource for natural language processing systems up to now. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database, edited by Christiane Fellbaum, discusses the design of WordNet from both theoretical and historical perspectives, provides an up-to-date description of the lexical database, and presents a set of applications of WordNet. The book contains a foreword by George Miller, an introduction by Christiane Fellbaum, seven chapters from the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory of Princeton University, where WordNet was produced, and nine chapters contributed by scientists from elsewhere. Miller's foreword offers a fascinating account of the history of WordNet. He discusses the presuppositions of such a lexical database, how the top-level noun categories were determined, and the sources of the words in WordNet. He also writes about the evolution of WordNet from its original incarnation as a dictionary browser to a broad-coverage lexicon, and the involvement of different people during its various stages of development over a decade. It makes very interesting reading for casual and serious users of WordNet and anyone who is grateful for the existence of WordNet. The book is organized in three parts. Part I is about WordNet itself and consists of four chapters: "Nouns in WordNet" by George Miller, "Modifiers in WordNet" by Katherine Miller, "A semantic network of English verbs" by Christiane Fellbaum, and "Design and implementation of the WordNet lexical database and search software" by Randee Tengi. These chapters are essentially updated versions of four papers from Miller (1990). Compared with the earlier papers, the chapters in this book focus more on the underlying assumptions and rationales behind the design decisions. The description of the information contained in WordNet, however, is not as detailed as in Miller (1990). The main new additions in these chapters include an explanation of sense grouping in George Miller's chapter, a section about adverbs in Katherine Miller's chapter, observations about autohyponymy (one sense of a word being a hyponym of another sense of the same word) and autoantonymy (one sense of a word being an antonym of another sense of the same word) in Fellbaum's chapter, and Tengi's description of the Grinder, a program that converts the files the lexicographers work with to searchable lexical databases. The three papers in Part II are characterized as "extensions, enhancements and