SENSEIDX(5WN)						      WordNettm File Formats						     SENSEIDX(5WN)

NAME

       index.sense, sense.idx - WordNet's sense index

DESCRIPTION

       The WordNet sense index provides an alternate method for accessing synsets and word senses in the WordNet database.  It is useful to appli-
       cations that retrieve synsets or other information related to a specific sense in WordNet, rather than all the senses of a word or colloca-
       tion.   It  can also be used with tools like grep and Perl to find all senses of a word in one or more parts of speech.	A specific WordNet
       sense, encoded as a sense_key, can be used as an index into this file to obtain its WordNet sense number, the database byte offset  of  the
       synset containing the sense, and the number of times it has been tagged in the semantic concordance texts.

       Concatenating  the lemma and lex_sense fields of a semantically tagged word (represented in a <wf ... > attribute/value pair) in a semantic
       concordance file, using % as the concatenation character, creates the sense_key for that sense, which can in turn be  used  to  search  the
       sense index file.

       A  sense_key  is the best way to represent a sense in semantic tagging or other systems that refer to WordNet senses.  sense_keys are inde-
       pendent of WordNet sense numbers and synset_offsets, which vary between versions of the database.  Using the sense index and  a	sense_key,
       the  corresponding synset (via the synset_offset) and WordNet sense number can easily be obtained.  A mapping from noun sense_keys in Word-
       Net 1.6 to corresponding 2.0 sense_keys is provided with version 2.0, and is described in sensemap(5WN).

       See wndb(5WN) for a thorough discussion of the WordNet database files.

   File Format
       The sense index file lists all of the senses in the WordNet database with each line representing one sense.  The file  is  in  alphabetical
       order, fields are separated by one space, and each line is terminated with a newline character.

       Each line is of the form:

	      sense_key  synset_offset	sense_number  tag_cnt

       sense_key  is  an encoding of the word sense.  Programs can construct a sense key in this format and use it as a binary search key into the
       sense index file.  The format of a sense_key is described below.

       synset_offset is the byte offset that the synset containing the sense is found at in the database "data" file corresponding to the part	of
       speech  encoded in the sense_key.  synset_offset is an 8 digit, zero-filled decimal integer, and can be used with fseek(3) to read a synset
       from the data file.  When passed to the WordNet library function read_synset() along with the syntactic category, a data structure contain-
       ing the parsed synset is returned.

       sense_number  is  a decimal integer indicating the sense number of the word, within the part of speech encoded in sense_key, in the WordNet
       database.  See wndb(5WN) for information about how sense numbers are assigned.

       tag_cnt represents the decimal number of times the sense is tagged in various semantic concordance texts.  A tag_cnt of	0  indicates  that
       the sense has not been semantically tagged.

   Sense Key Encoding
       A sense_key is represented as:

	      lemma%lex_sense

       where lex_sense is encoded as:

	      ss_type:lex_filenum:lex_id:head_word:head_id

       lemma  is  the  ASCII  text of the word or collocation as found in the WordNet database index file corresponding to pos.  lemma is in lower
       case, and collocations are formed by joining individual words with an underscore (_) character.

       ss_type is a one digit decimal integer representing the synset type for the sense.  See Synset Type below for a listing of the numbers cor-
       responding to each synset type.

       lex_filenum  is	a two digit decimal integer representing the name of the lexicographer file containing the synset for the sense.  See lex-
       names(5WN) for the list of lexicographer file names and their corresponding numbers.

       lex_id is a two digit decimal integer that, when appended onto lemma, uniquely identifies a sense within a lexicographer file.  lex_id num-
       bers  usually start with 00, and are incremented as additional senses of the word are added to the same file, although there is no require-
       ment that the numbers be consecutive or begin with 00.  Note that a value of 00 is the default, and therefore is not present in	lexicogra-
       pher  files.   Only  non-default lex_id values must be explicitly assigned in lexicographer files.  See wninput(5WN) for information on the
       format of lexicographer files.

       head_word is only present if the sense is in an adjective satellite synset.  It is the lemma of the first  word	of  the  satellite's  head
       synset.

       head_id	is  a two digit decimal integer that, when appended onto head_word, uniquely identifies the sense of head_word within a lexicogra-
       pher file, as described for lex_id.  There is a value in this field only if head_word is present.

   Synset Type
       The synset type is encoded as follows:

	      1    NOUN
	      2    VERB
	      3    ADJECTIVE
	      4    ADVERB
	      5    ADJECTIVE SATELLITE

NOTES

       For non-satellite senses the head_word and head_id fields have no values, however the field separator character (:) is present.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES (UNIX)
       WNHOME		   Base directory for WordNet.	Default is /usr/local/WordNet-3.0.

       WNSEARCHDIR	   Directory in which the WordNet database has been installed.	Default is WNHOME/dict.

REGISTRY (WINDOWS)
       HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWordNet3.0WNHome
			   Base directory for WordNet.	Default is C:Program FilesWordNet3.0.

FILES

       index.sense	   sense index

SEE ALSO

       binsrch(3WN), wnsearch(3WN), lexnames(5WN), wnintro(5WN), sensemap(5WN), wndb(5WN), wninput(5WN).

WordNet 3.0							     Dec 2006							     SENSEIDX(5WN)