ROWORDNETLIB - THE FIRST API FOR THE ROMANIAN WORDNET

The article presents RoWordNetLib, a Java Application Programming Interface (API) for the Romanian WordNet (RoWN). RoWN is a mature semantic network mirroring Princeton WordNet, and it is in continuous development by RACAI since its first version in 2004. A wordnet is a very useful resource in several domains such as Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Word Sense Disambiguation, etc. The development of this API is meant to ease the use of the Romanian WordNet in both academic and industry environments. We implemented several distinct functionality classes: RoWN file input/output, wordnet programmatic access methods, set operations on multiple wordnet objects, word sense disambiguation basic algorithms that enable the use of distance-based and semantic similarity functions. The API is open-source, freely available and extendible.