Detail map of Princeton, New Jersey, United States Overview map of Princeton, New Jersey, United States

A: Princeton, New Jersey, United States

George A. Miller Begins WordNet, a Lexical Database

1985

In 1985 psychologist and cognitive scientist George A. Miller and his team at Princeton began development of WordNet, a lexical database for the English language.

WordNet

"groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. The purpose is twofold: to produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications" (Wikipedia article on WordNet).

You can browse Wordnet at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/.

WordNet has been used for a number of different purposes in information systems, including word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, automatic text classification, automatic text summarization, and even automatic crossword puzzle generation.

Timeline Themes