Language This Next-Generation Dictionary Provides a Global Tapestry of
Words

For those who love words, here's a grand, global feast.
Nearly two decades ago, Princeton University psychology professor George Miller needed a decent computerized dictionary to help devise experimental tests to determine how children's brains learn language.

I said 'I'll make my own dictionary,' recalled Miller, 81. So Miller got a small government grant and a stack of dictionaries and began typing in all the nouns. His wife took the adjectives, and a colleague took the verbs. With that, WordNet and the next generation of dictionaries were born, according to many linguists around the world.
Instead of just listing the words and their definitions, Miller then launched a worldwide project to show how every word is linked to another. For example, type in the word "tree" and you'll get not only the definition, synonyms, and antonyms but also the hypernyms (a tree is a kind of what?), meronyms (what are the parts of a tree?), and more.

WordNet now links over 138,838 English words in hundreds of
thousands of different ways. Linguists at universities around the world are creating online dictionaries modeled after WordNet, in more than a dozen languages, and meeting through the Global WordNet Association.
Their goal? To develop WordNets for every language and link them in one vast digital trellis of words that allows computers to provide instant, accurate translations.
It's the golden fleece of natural language processing -- a way for a machine to translate where humans can't.
· WarofWords [Cogsci]