Ruby, Internet, and Programming

I am creating a tiny tool to explore relationships between two words utilizing WordNet: Astrolabe. It is intended to help ESL learners like me to grasp a clearer picture of a particular sense by recognizing the relationships between two words that have something in common. Motivation I have been trying to extend my vocabulary with Anki for years, little by little. It is an awesome tool to learn new words. I have learned about 6,000 words with it.

In the WordNet library, a synset is represented by a struct called Synset. There are 26 members in this struct. While playing with tracing the WordNet graph, I had a chance to use half of them. Let me introduce them. Basic Information About The Synset Itself char* defn is a short description of the synset (a.k.a. gloss). It often includes a couple of short example sentences, too. int* pos is the part of speech of the synset.

WordNet library has handy functions to deal with irregular inflections like morphstr(). It tries to find the base form of the given word and the pos (part of speech) in the database. When it comes to looking up a word with WordNet, the word is often unfamiliar for the person. You can guess whether the word is singular or plural form, present or past tense from the context of the sentence.

TL; DR WordNet helps English learners with getting a clearer grasp of relationships between a couple of words. Its API lets the users explore the whole network of English words in their own way along with their purpose. WordNet is a huge lexical database of English. Every sense of words is represented as a “synset” (a set of synonyms) in the database. Every synset has its short definition with a couple of example sentences and pointers to related words.