1. Exploring and Navigating: Tools for GermaNet
Marc Finthammer and Irene Cramer
Faculty of Cultural Studies, Dortmund University of Technology, Germany
1. Motivation
GermaNet1 is regarded to be a valuable resource for many German NLP-applications, corpus research and teaching;
Unfortunately, the user is left on his own with a bunch of XML-files and insufficient means for navigation and exploration;
While intensively working with it in our project HyTex2, we implemented two GUI-based tools for exploration and navigation – both are freely available for download
 the GermaNet Explorer and
 the GermaNet Pathfinder
3. GermaNet Pathfinder
Features:
calculation of semantic relatedness between given word pair or synset pair – 11 relatedness measures available: 8 GermaNet-based, 3 Google-based
visualization of the respective path (Figure 4) and visualization of synsets / subtrees / complete hyponym-tree
automatic calculation of relatedness for a complete list of word pairs
inspection and extraction of many features of GermaNet and its hyponym-tree representation
2. GermaNet Explorer
Features
word sense retrieval function (Figure 1, region 1)
structured presentation of all semantic relations pointing to/from the synonym set (synset) containing the currently selected word sense (Figure 1, region 2)
visual, graph-based navigation function
representation of all synsets / wordsenses, (Figure 2) as well as retrieval, filter, and sort functions (Figure 2, region 2)
Figure 3
Figure 4
4. Conclusion & Future Work
We already successfully utilized the GermaNet Explorer in various areas of our research and teaching: e.g. in experiments on the manual annotation of lexical chains and for the visualization of lexical semantic concepts in courses.
GermaNet Pathfinder has successfully been used in our lexical chainer GLexi; we also found it very helpful to explore GermaNet and to retrace semantically motivated paths.
We currently adapt both tools to the brand-new GermaNet Version.
Figure 1
Figure 2
References
1 Lothar Lemnitzer and Claudia Kunze (2002): Germanet - representation, visualization, application. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2002).
2 The HyTex (see project, funded the German Research Foundation (DFG), aims at developing strategies for the text-to-hypertext-conversion based on text-grammatical features. Various sub-tasks of our research, such as lexical chaining or the automatic extraction of definitions, highly rely on the semantic knowledge represented in GermaNet.
3 Jiang and Conrath, 1997 / Leacock and Chodorow, 1998 / Lin, 1998 / Resnik, 1995 / Wu and Palmer, 1994 – please also refer to our Paper for detailed information about the relatedness measures implemented.