Tools for exploring GermaNet in the context of cl-teaching
Irene Cramer, Marc Finthammer · 2008
Abstract. Word nets, such as Princeton WordNet or GermaNet, are resources organizing a (more or less extensive) fraction of the vocabulary of a language according to lexical semantic relations. Such resources are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and com-putational linguistics (CL) both for research and teaching purposes. While several graphical user interfaces (GUI) exist for Princeton WordNet–some of which are also available online –GermaNet still lacks such utilities. In this paper we describe two GUI-based tools meant to facilitate the navigation through and exploration of GermaNet. Both are freely available for download from our project web page (www.hytex.info). We additionally discuss ways of de-ploying these tools in teaching. We argue that the GUI-based access to word nets, which can be regarded as a fundamental resource in CL and NLP, enhances the students ’ understanding of basic lexical semantic concepts, computational semantics and lexicography. 1