Problems and Limitations
Unlike other dictionaries, WordNet does not include information about etymology, pronunciation and the forms of irregular verbs and contains only limited information about usage.
The actual lexicographical and semantic information is maintained in lexicographer files, which are then processed by a tool called grind to produce the distributed database. Both grind and the lexicographer files are freely available in a separate distribution, but modifying and maintaining the database requires expertise.
Though WordNet contains a sufficiently wide range of common words, it does not cover special domain vocabulary. Since it is primarily designed to act as an underlying database for different applications, those applications cannot be used in specific domains that are not covered by WordNet.
In most works that claim to have integrated WordNet into other ontologies, the content of WordNet has not simply been corrected when semantic problems have been encountered; instead, WordNet has been used as an inspiration source but heavily re-interpreted and updated whenever suitable. This was the case when, for example, the top-level ontology of WordNet was re-structured according to the OntoClean based approach or when WordNet was used as a primary source for constructing the lower classes of the SENSUS ontology.
WordNet is the most commonly used computational lexicon of English for word sense disambiguation (WSD), a task aimed to assigning the most appropriate senses (i.e. synsets) to words in context. However, it has been argued that WordNet encodes sense distinctions that are too fine-grained even for humans. This issue prevents WSD systems from achieving high performance. The granularity issue has been tackled by proposing clustering methods that automatically group together similar senses of the same word.
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Famous quotes containing the words problems and, problems and/or limitations:
“Sustained unemployment not only denies parents the opportunity to meet the food, clothing, and shelter needs of their children but also denies them the sense of adequacy, belonging, and worth which being able to do so provides. This increases the likelihood of family problems and decreases the chances of many children to be adequately prepared for school.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot—a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life—of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)