Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft

GermaNet - An Introduction

What is GermaNet?

GermaNet is a lexical-semantic net that relates German nouns, verbs, and adjectives semantically by grouping lexical units that express the same concept into synsets and by defining semantic relations between these synsets. GermaNet has much in common with the English WordNet® and can be viewed as an on-line thesaurus or a light-weight ontology.

The elements and structure of the data are specified in detail in the Description section.

GermaNet has been developed and maintained within various projects at the Division of General and Computational Linguistics, at the University of Tübingen, since 1997. It has been integrated into the EuroWordNet (EWN), a multilingual lexical-semantic database.

An in-depth introduction of GermaNet and EuroWordNet, in chapter 6.2 in Lothar Lemnitzer and Claudia Kunze: Computerlexikographie. Gunter Narr Verlag 2007, can be found here (note that it is written in German). For more recent publications related to GermaNet, please have a look at the Publications section.

How do I get the data?

GermaNet is free for academic users with a signed license. To download the license and learn more about our "R&D" and commercial licenses, please go to the license page.

Are there programming APIs?

We have developed APIs for Java and Python. See the Applications and Tools section for details.

Are there online tools?

GermaNet Rover can be used to explore the data or to calculate the semantic relatedness / similarity between two synsets. It can be used by anyone affiliated with one of thousands of academic institutions. See the Applications and Tools section for more details.

Current Size of GermaNet (Release 18.0, May 2023)

  • Synsets: 167163
  • Lexical units: 215000
  • Literals: 199692
  • 1,29 lexical units per synset
  • Number of conceptual relations: 181530
  • Number of lexical relations: 12602 (synonymy excluded)
  • Number of split compounds: 121655
  • Number of Interlingual Index (ILI) records: 28563 (separate download)
  • Number of Wiktionary sense descriptions: 29546 (separate download)