What is it?

Given two terms, wnconnect is a program that finds and reports all possible connections between them in WordNet, a popular and freely-available synset (synonym set) network with semantic relations. WordNet is from Princeton University, see http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/.

Example: happy and sad

Here are the three shortest paths between the two terms, as reported by wnconnect. Synsets are enclosed in square brackets. The paths can be summarized graphically, as shown on the right:

happy/a is in [happy] happy and unhappy/a are antonyms For [unhappy], see also [sad] sad/a is in the synset [sad] happy/a is in [happy] For [happy], see also [glad] glad and sad/a are antonyms happy/s is in [happy,pleased] [happy,pleased] and [glad] are similar glad and sad/a are antonyms [There are actually 6 different paths between happy and sad in WordNet 1.7.1. The full graph generated by wnconnect is shown here.]

wnconnect was born because I was interested in seeing if an ontologically-based system like WordNet could be used to compute cases of Semantic Opposition in the sense of (Pustejovsky, 2001) involving change-of-state verbs in natural language. (This is a subcase of the famous Frame Problem from Artificial Intelligence.)
Consider:

(1) a.	John mended the torn dress
b.	John mended the red dress

In (1a), as a result of the event of mending a torn dress, we might reasonably expect dress to no longer be in state torn. In other words, semantic opposition should obtain between mend and tear. Compare this with (1b), where we might reasonably expect the dress to remain red.

Illustrated below is the shortest path between mend and tear in WordNet. This path contains an antonym link (shown in red) that encodes the semantic opposition.

mend/v is in [repair,mend,fix,bushel,doctor,furbish_up,restore,touch_on] repair and break/v are antonyms bust in [break,bust] and bust/v related by verb.contact tear/v is in the synset [tear,rupture,snap,bust]

[For completeness, note that the shortest path between mend and red (as a satellite adjective) is much longer and does not involve any antonym relations, see separate page here.]

Availability: Free. Now available in GUI and non-GUI versions for various platforms!

Graphical User Interface Versions (GUI):

• As a Mac OS X application (wnconnect) with a GUI. See Software Requirements Section below.
• As a Windows application with a GUI. Go here.
• As a Linux application with a GUI. Go here.

Text-based User Interface Versions:

• As Prolog software compiled for Windows. No GUI. Go here.
• As platform-independent Prolog software (prologwn) without a GUI. Go here.

MacOS X Version
Software Requirements:

• Application wnconnect

  Mac OS X 10.2 (or later) [A requirement of Tcl/Tk Aqua.] Tcl/Tk Aqua 8.4.4. You need to install this. No getting around it. Sorry. Free download. [Use "Get Mac OS X Software..." from the Apple menu.] You don't need Sicstus Prolog. wnconnect is a standalone application with a runtime version of Sicstus Prolog built in. You don't need to download WordNet. A slightly extended and modified version of WordNet in Prolog format is entombed in the application. See below for details. neato (a graph renderer) is part of the graphviz package. Optional: install graphviz from http://www.graphviz.org/. neato and the dynamic libraries it needs are bundled with wnconnect. But you may need to install things that neato depends on in order to use it properly. See separate page here. You should also install ghostscript (availble for free) if you want to use the PDF graph output option which calls ps2pdf.

  13Mb (disk image), expands to 56Mb [Depending on the browser, you may need to control-click the download button and select save to disk.] Install instructions here Guide here

How does wnconnect work?

See the separate page here.

Windows Version
[Ported by Mans Hulden.]

Download: WNconnect-1.7.1-install.exe (11.1MB)

Installation Notes:

• Tcl/Tk, TkImg, GraphViz are bundled in the installer.

• In case you want to see pdf output in addition to the regular display of images, a ps2pdf utility must reside in the path.

  GSview, which includes a ps2pdf utility, is available from:

  ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/aladdin/gs550/gsv27550.exe

  Wnconnect uses the default image viewer associated with PNG files in Windows to display images of networks. For a good multi-purpose image viewer, we recommend IrfanView. It is an excellent, small, snappy, and free image viewer available from http://www.irfanview.com/.

Linux Version
[Ported by Mans Hulden.]

Download: wnconnect-1.7.1-linux.i386.rpm (10.5MB)

Installation Notes:

• Package Requirements:
  Tcl/Tk 8.4, TkImg, GraphViz, ps2pdf (optional)

• run (as root):
  # rpm -Uvh wnconnect-1.7.1-linux.i386.rpm

• Packages:
  TkImg is available from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkimg/
  GraphViz's home page is: http://www.graphviz.org/
  rpm packages for a number of platforms are available at: http://dag.wieers.com/packages/graphviz/

Sandiway Fong
November 11th 2003
Updated: April 22nd 2005
Tucson, Arizona