xfce4-dict and WordNet

[Liviu Andronic]

Hello Enrico,

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 8:22 PM, Enrico Tröger <enrico.troeger at uvena.de> wrote:
> Find the real differences between wordnet 2.0 and 3.0, check them and
[..]
> wrong or bad descriptions and such. But probably the main content is
> the same and remained the same.
>
From quick glancing at differences between 2.0 and 3.0, it is mainly
this feeling I that I had.



> Generally I'm not against adding a wordnet interface and it's probably
> not that difficult but I don't want to do this if it isn't necessary.
>
Well, there is also eXtended WordNet 2.0 [2] for WordNet 2.0. I did
not (yet) install it, so couldn't judge on the improvements over
wn-2.0, or 3.0. Direct support for wn (or xwn) would be rather cool,
but dict-wn-2.0 should probably suffice for most uses (provided that
it works as expected).


[2] http://xwn.hlt.utdallas.edu/about.html



> I'm not sure. Do they just display the website contents in StarDict(1),
> do they receive the search results via some kind of web API from these
> service(2) or do they parse the website output and display the results
> (3)?
>
> (1) and (2) should be legally but if they do it like in (3) I'm pretty
> sure that is against the law and/or the service's terms of use.
> I definitely don't want to do something like this.
>
I sent an inquiry to WR.com about a legal way of including its output
in Xfce4-dict. Will report here their stance.



> So, I think it is a) your dict-wn dictionary which might be broken or
> its index file or b) it's because you are using the -pre version, why
> don't you use the final dict-wn 2.0 which was released years ago? Why
> using an even older version?
>
I don't seem to have the -pre version, not from what I see here. I
install (since Gentoo, build from source) app-dicts/dictd-wn-2.0. The
downloaded file is dict-wn-2.0.tar.gz, 8,160,961 bytes of size, and it
coincides to the one on dictd ftp site.

At build time I can see this information about the index:
"cat data/index.* | sort | ./wnfilter > wn.dict
      154610 headwords"

Does this coincide with your build?

The telnet verification for "abbreviation" fails here, and for
"machine" does not (I initially chose these words arbitrarily). I made
sure that we run similar versions of dictd, 1.9.15, as I thought that
this might be the problem.
liviu at localhost ~ $ telnet localhost 2628
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 localhost.localdomain dictd 1.9.15/rf on Linux
2.6.22-gentoo-r5-0.2 <auth.mime>
<1.16650.1220111339 at localhost.localdomain>
define wn abbreviation
552 no match [d/m/c = 0/0/17; 0.000r 0.000u 0.000s]
define wn machine
150 2 definitions retrieved
151 "machine" wn "WordNet (r) 2.0"
machine
[..definitions..]



> Furthermore, you are aware there is already a web-search which opens a
> dictionary service in a web browser?
>
Yes, but I tend not to use it frequently; I far too often switch among
WR.com dictionaries. It would be handy if Xfce4-dict supported an
"easy" or "on-the-fly" switch (bad wording) of the web dictionary URL.

Regards,
Liviu