NLP Lexical & Semantic Resources Comparison
August 8, 2025•345 words
NLP Lexical & Semantic Resources Comparison
| Resource | Main Focus | Language Coverage | Data Type | Key Feature | Example Use | Official Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordNet | Lexical database of English | English | Synonym sets (synsets) + semantic relations (hypernym, hyponym, etc.) | Organizes words by paradigmatic relations (meaning-based links) | Finding synonyms, semantic similarity | https://wordnet.princeton.edu/ |
| HowNet | Bilingual semantic knowledge base | Chinese + English | Concepts decomposed into sememes | Breaks meaning into smallest semantic units | Word sense disambiguation, semantic reasoning | http://www.keenage.com/ |
| FrameNet | Frame semantics | English (some multilingual projects) | Frames (situations) + frame elements (roles) | Groups words by the conceptual scenes they evoke | Semantic role labeling, information extraction | https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/ |
| ConceptNet | Commonsense knowledge graph | Multilingual | Nodes = concepts, edges = relations (IsA, UsedFor, etc.) | Encodes everyday knowledge for reasoning | Commonsense QA, text understanding | https://conceptnet.io/ |
| VerbNet | Verb classification | English | Verb classes + syntactic frames + thematic roles | Links verb syntax to semantic roles | Semantic parsing, verb behavior prediction | https://uvi.colorado.edu/verbnet/ |
| PropBank | Predicate–argument annotations | English (and some multilingual versions) | Numbered arguments (Arg0, Arg1, etc.) for verbs | Adds semantic roles to parsed corpora | Training semantic role labeling models | https://propbank.github.io/ |
| Treebank | Parsed sentence corpus | Many languages | Annotated syntax trees (constituency or dependency) | Provides gold-standard parsing data | Training syntactic parsers | https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC99T42 |
| SyntaxNet | Neural network parser | Many languages | POS tags + dependency parse trees | Google’s open-source syntactic analysis tool | Automatic grammar parsing | https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/syntaxnet |
| SyntagNet | Syntagmatic lexical relations | English | Co-occurring WordNet sense pairs (noun–verb, noun–noun) | Manually disambiguated combinations | Knowledge-based WSD, collocation analysis | http://syntagnet.org/ |
| BabelNet | Multilingual semantic network | 600+ languages | Babel synsets (merged from WordNet, Wikipedia, etc.) | Combines lexicon + encyclopedic knowledge | Cross-lingual search, MT, WSD | https://babelnet.org/ |