From: Jano Svitok <jan.svitok@...>
Date: 2008-04-08T02:39:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Wordnet and Ruby

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 4:54 PM, Glenn <glenn_ritz@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  I am trying to use the Wordnet dictionary (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/) with Ruby and am not having any luck.
>
>  There is a Ruby tie-in for Wordnet.  The project's home page is at http://www.deveiate.org/projects/Ruby-WordNet/.
> It's not clear to me whether this is an active project,

Their trac says last change in sources 8 months ago.

> or if Ruby-Wordnet can be installed on Windows.  I tried, but I don't think it installed successfully.  If anyone has any insight into this, it would be greatly appreciated.  I'd like to know also if there is a way to install Ruby-Wordnet as a gem.

It seems you have to install bdb extension first.
These two pages seem helpful:

http://linuxbrit.co.uk/rbot/wiki/InstallGuide (look for BDB on Win32)
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/25223

When you have bdb, just continue with ruby-wordnet installation. (This
is what I've read out of the docs/sources right now, so usual warnings
apply.)

>  The project that I am working on involves parsing text and replacing the words in the text with their parts of speech, so I need to have access to a sizable English dictionary, preferably one that is free (or cheap) and freely available.  If anyone knows about such a dictionary, and knows how to tie it in with Ruby, and could let me know about it, that would be great.  If such a add-on was a Ruby gem, even better.

British National Corpus ;-)
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/index.xml.ID=products, it seems
that a BNC Baby can be obtained for 30 Euros together with Brown
corpus.
It's XML (although quite large) so with REXML help (or any other XML
parser, and maybe with some preprocessing) you should be able to use
that.

Jano