Domain–specific Wordnets: Projects and Achievements Overview

The subject of this article are domain–specific wordnets containing information on specialised vocabulary in specific fields of knowledge. The wordnets are understood, on the one hand, as lexical databases and, on the other, as relational onomasiological dictionaries. The aim is to review what has been achieved in the construction of such lexicons, i.e. to determine which specialised wordnets were planned, which have already been built and whether the results of this work are publicly available. Based on an analysis of English–language publications and on the results of Internet resource searches, it can be said that the achievements in building domain–specific wordnets are not spectacular. About a dozen of them have been developed worldwide so far, but it is difficult to assess the progress of the work, as most of them are not available to users. Several projects have instead been abandoned at an early stage of development. For these reasons, the methodology for constructing domain–specific wordnets is still experimental and constitutes a current research problem.