WordNet As An Ontology
The hypernym/hyponym relationships among the noun synsets can be interpreted as specialization relations between conceptual categories. In other words, WordNet can be interpreted and used as a lexical ontology in the computer science sense. However, such an ontology should normally be corrected before being used since it contains hundreds of basic semantic inconsistencies such as (i) the existence of common specializations for exclusive categories and (ii) redundancies in the specialization hierarchy. Furthermore, transforming WordNet into a lexical ontology usable for knowledge representation should normally also involve (i) distinguishing the specialization relations into subtypeOf and instanceOf relations, and (ii) associating intuitive unique identifiers to each category. Although such corrections and transformations have been performed and documented as part of the integration of WordNet 1.7 into the cooperatively updatable knowledge base of WebKB-2, most projects claiming to re-use WordNet for knowledge-based applications (typically, knowledge-oriented information retrieval) simply re-use it directly. WordNet has also been converted to a formal specification, by means of a hybrid bottom-up top-down methodology to automatically extract association relations from WordNet, and interpret these associations in terms of a set of conceptual relations, formally defined in the DOLCE foundational ontology.
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