Support sense-to-synset relations

[jmccrae]

Sense to synset relations are useful and would help to solve issues such as in #732

This issue is to verify that we can support such relations and that all relevant tooling (validation, EWE, en-word.net) and release formats (esp. WNDB) work with such relations.

Note that there is no chance that WNDB will support this as it is legacy format, so in this case, we will simply export as sense relations referring to the first member of the target synset

[rhdunn]

The source/target word numbers in a WNDB pointer are 1-based. Technically, this allows for nn00 for sense-to-synset and 00nn for synset-to-sense pointer relationships. The wndb docs mention 0000 being used for semantic relations (synset-to-synset). When discussing lexical relations (sense-to-sense), it states that word numbers start at 1.

The question is then how WNDB tools will handle these.

It is interesting to note that WordNet Search shows lexical relationships as sense-to-synset relationships, not as sense-to-sense relationships (e.g. http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=1&o3=&o4=&s=peripherally&i=4&h=11000#c). This is displayed incorrectly according to the format definition. I don't know if there are any examples from WordNet 3.1 where sense-to-synset is intended.

[jmccrae]

Yes, that is interesting, we could try to use codes like 00nn for this, however my fear is that it would break a large number of tools that do not expect such a code.

There are certainly relations that come from Princeton WordNet, which could be modelled as sense-to-synset, e.g., 'scallion' is linked to 'United States' but could equally apply to other members of this synset (USA, America, etc.).