Current Release & Downloads * References * Links * 日本語
We are aiming to build a large scale, freely available, semantic dictionary of Japanese. As a first step, we have created a Wordnet for Japanese, inspired by the Princeton WordNet and the Global WordNet Grid. Basically, you may use, copy, modify and distribute the Japanese WordNet for any purpose without any fee, so long as you keep it under the same license. See the full license for details.
The Japanese WordNet was originally developed at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in 2006, to support for Natural Language Processing research in Japan. The first version (0.9) was released in February 2009. It is currently maintained by an international team. As the first step in compiling the Japanese WordNet, we added Japanese equivalents to synsets of the Princeton WordNet. In future releases we will add synsets which do not exist in the Princeton WordNet, and modify the structure of the hierarchy, in order to make it better represent the Japanese language.
Please feel free to use the WordNet in any way you please. If you use it for research, please cite one (or more) of our papers. If you have any questions or comments please contact us at: jwordnet@gmail.com. The current Release is Wn-Ja 1.1 All relations (hypernyms, meronyms, ...) come from Princeton WordNet 3.0. We have enriched the synsets with Japanese translations of the definitions and examples as well as lemmas.
Disclaimer: We estimate that this release contains errors in as many as 5% of entries. We decided to spend more effort in increasing the cover than in checking. As we translate the glosses and sense tag text, we expect to fix many of the errors. We also welcome feedback.
There are several interfaces available for the Japanese WordNet:
The Japanese Wordnet is used in the following applications:
It is also used in the Japanese edition of Natural Language Processing with Python (Bird, Klein and Loper, 2009) in the section on the Japanese WordNet (12.1.5).