JWNL is an API for accessing WordNet-style relational dictionaries. It also provides functionality beyond data access, such as relationship discovery and morphological processing. The current and (mostly) stable release is JWNL 1.3. JWNL 1.4 is under development. Support will be added for WordNet versions 2.1 and 3.0. Additionally, bug fixes and improved documentation will be available.

Changes From Earlier Versions

Starting with version 1.3, JWNL is under the BSD license, meaning that it can be used in commercial packages. This change can be considered retroactive (i.e. you're okay if you're using earlier versions of JWNL in a commercial software package).

Version 1.3 has changed significantly from earlier versions. So much so, in fact, that it is not backwardly compatible with earlier versions. For this reason, earlier versions will no longer be supported.

The major changes in version 1.3 are:

• Updated classes in the data package to be compatible with WordNet 2.0
• Updated DefaultMorphologicalProcessor to stem additonal suffixes added in WordNet 1.7
• Fixed bugs in FileBackedDictionary and MapBackedDictionary that caused lookups on capitalized terms to return invalid results
• Introduced DatabaseBackedDictionary, plus files to create and populate the WordNet database.
• Removed the util.logging package. JWNL now has a runtime dependancy on Apache commons-logging.
• Fixed several bugs in the relationshp api. The interface for finding relationships is now contained in RelationshipFinder.
• License changed to BSD-style licence.
• Improved the dictionary caching api. AbstractCachingDictionary now has methods to turn caching on and off and change the cache sizes.
• Added getRandomIndexWord method to Dictionary.
• Added new example programs (VocabTrainer, TextInterface) to the utilities package.
• Added PointerType.getAllPointerTypesForPOS().