The search box and history

The first thing you see on the Synset Search page is the search form:

This form allows you to search for synsets in GermaNet. A synset is a set of synonyms, or words that express the same concept.

The term you type into the search box will be matched against all the synsets in GermaNet. Any synset containing at least one matching word will be returned.

Click "Show search options" to see how to refine your search. You can search with regular expressions or by edit distance, and you can narrow your search by grammatical category or semantic class.

To the right of the search form, you can see some buttons representing your search history. They look like this:

Clicking one of these buttons will run the corresponding search again using all the same search options. Hover over a button to see how many results that search returned.

Search results

For each synset in the search results, a brief summary like this one is displayed in the left hand column:

At the top of the summary, you see the words in the synset (Computernetzwerk, Computernetz, and so on) and definitions for these words, as well as the semantic class the synset belongs to (Artefakt). This information helps you distinguish different synsets containing the same word.

The boxes below summarize the conceptual relations of the synset by their types. This synset has 3 component meronyms, for example.

You can click anywhere on the result summary to select it. This displays more details about the synset in the right-hand column of the interface. These details are divided between two tabs: Conceptual Relations and Lexical Units and Relations.

Details: Conceptual relations

On the Conceptual Relations tab, you will see all of the synset's conceptual relations, grouped by type.

A conceptual relation is a relation between two synsets. Each related synset is displayed as a group of buttons, and each word in the related synset gets its own button.

For example, one of the related synsets here is the synset:

Clicking on any of these buttons will run a new search for the word on the button. The related synset will be selected (highlighted) in the result list. All other synsets containing that word will also be returned.

The conceptual relation known as hypernymy/hyponymy is particularly important in GermaNet, because every synset is guaranteed to have at least one hypernym. The synsets in GermaNet form a connected directed graph, where each synset is a vertex, and there is an edge from each synset to its hypernym.

The Conceptual Relations tab shows you a visualization of part of this graph for the selected synset. It looks like this:

In this visualization, the selected synset appears at the bottom. Each arrow points from a synset to a hypernym synset. The visualization follows the hypernym relation all the way up to the (artificial) GNROOT synset. It shows all paths via from the selected synset to GNROOT. In this case, there is only one path; but there can be several, because some synsets have multiple hypernyms.

You can zoom in or out by scrolling, and reposition the graph by dragging it; or you can use the navigation buttons on the graph to do the same things. Use the button to reset the zoom and re-center the graph.

Details: Lexical units and relations

The individual words in a synset are called lexical units. If you switch over to the Lexical Units and Relations tab, you'll see more data about these lexical units.

Each lexical unit in the synset has its own sub-tab displaying information for that lexical unit. These tabs look like this:

Lexical units can have lexical relations to other lexical units. Just like on the Conceptual Relations tab, these are displayed as search buttons, grouped by relation type. Every lexical unit bears the synonym relation to others in the same synset, as shown here.

One family of lexical relations that are of particular interest in German hold between a compound lexical unit and the constituents of that compound, like the relation of Computernetzwerk to Computer and Netzwerk. These relations are displayed in a table at the bottom of the sub-tab for a compound lexical unit.

For some lexical units, GermaNet also contains data about related records in other lexical resources, which will be displayed when available. These include definitions on German Wiktionary and in EuroWordNet's Interlingual Index. Computernetzwerk, for example, has a Wiktionary definition.