From: Michael Granger Date: 2008-04-10T10:16:27+09:00 Subject: Re: Wordnet and Ruby On Apr 5, 2008, at 7:54 AM, Glenn wrote: > 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, 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 might have some insight (I'm the author of the Ruby-WordNet library), but I don't have access to a Windows machine and very little Ruby+Windows experience. Ruby-WordNet is "active", though, at least in the sense that I'm still interested in maintaining and releasing it. I'd welcome any patches that made it easier to install or use. > I'd like to know also if there is a way to install Ruby-Wordnet as a > gem. There currently is not, as the released version of Ruby-WordNet uses both bdb and the WordNet dict files. Bdb isn't available as a gem, and the WordNet dict files require separate installation, so it's a bit difficult to gemify at the moment. I have a version in development (well, more of a quick hack, really) which uses a Sequel-backed dataset (as in http:// sequel.rubyforge.org/) instead of bdb, which in turn will make it possible to distribute as a gem, but it's not really ready for distribution yet. > 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. If you're extracting parts of speech, you might also be interested in CMU's Link Grammar (http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/), which is a syntactic English parser. I also maintain a Ruby interface to it (http://deveiate.org/projects/Ruby-LinkParser/ ), as well as a library that combines both it and WordNet with other NLP utilities in a general natural linguistics framework (http://deveiate.org/projects/Linguistics/ ). I'd be happy to answer any questions as best I can about all of the above. -- Michael Granger Rubymage, Architect, Believer The FaerieMUD Consortium