CNTLIST(5WN)

💖 CNTLIST 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the cntlist(5WN) page — it lives in the WordNet™ File Formats section of the manual, so it's a file-format girly, not a command. Two files are getting the spotlight here: cntlist and cntlist.rev. both of them list how many times each tagged sense shows up in a semantic concordance — one's sorted most-to-least frequent, the other's sorted by sense key. slay. let's get into it 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

• cntlist — a file listing the number of times each tagged sense occurs in a semantic concordance, sorted most to least frequently tagged 💅
• cntlist.rev — a file listing the number of times each tagged sense occurs in a semantic concordance, sorted by sense key 🌸

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🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

A cntlist file for a semantic concordance lists the number of times each semantically tagged sense occurs in the concordance and its sense number in the WordNet database. Each line in the file = one sense in the WordNet database that at least one semantic tag points at. And lowkey important: only senses that are tagged in a concordance make it into that concordance's cntlist file. no tag, no line. periodt. ✨

🦋 WordNet Database cntlist File 🦋

In the WordNet database, words get their sense numbers based on frequency of use in semantically tagged corpora. The cntlist file that grind(1WN) uses to build the WordNet database and assign those sense numbers is literally a union of the cntlist files from the various semantic concordances that were formerly released by Princeton University. This combined cntlist file ships with the WordNet package and lives in the WNSEARCHDIR directory. 👑

The cntlist.rev file is used at run-time by the WordNet library code and browser interfaces, so they can print, in the output display, how many times each sense has been tagged. it's giving backend bestie energy fr fr 💜

🌸 File Format 🌸

Each line in a cntlist file holds the info for one sense. The file is ordered from most to least frequently tagged sense. Fields are separated by one space, and every line ends with a newline character. Senses that share the same tag_cnt value are listed in reverse alphabetical order of the lemma field of the sense_key. (yes, tiebreakers. we love a structured queen. 🎀)

Every line in cntlist looks like this:

tag_cnt  sense_key  sense_number

where tag_cnt is the decimal number of times the sense is tagged in the corresponding semantic concordance. sense_key is a WordNet sense encoding and sense_number is a WordNet sense number as described in

(bestie the original sentence just… ends there. not me noticing. 🙈 i'm keeping it exactly as it is because facts are facts, even the unfinished ones.)

The cntlist.rev file has the exact same fields described above, just in this order:

sense_key  sense_number  tag_cnt

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📝 NOTES 📝

Princeton no longer maintains or releases the Semantic Concordance files. 😭 The cntlist file that was used to order the senses in WordNet 3.0 was generated from the Semantic Concordance files at the point that they were last updated in 2001.

In general, the order of senses presented usually reflects what the user would expect — however, sense ordering is now less reliable than in prior releases and should not be construed as an accurate indicator of frequency of use.

⚠️ read that again bestie: it is not a reliable frequency indicator anymore. do not build your whole personality on it. 💀

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🌟 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES (UNIX) 🌟

• WNHOME — base directory for WordNet. Default is /usr/local/WordNet-3.0. 🏠
• WNSEARCHDIR — directory in which the WordNet database has been installed. Default is WNHOME/dict. 🔍

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🪟 REGISTRY (WINDOWS) 🪟

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WordNet\3.0\WNHome — base directory for WordNet. Default is C:\Program Files\WordNet\3.0. 💻
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\WordNet\3.0\wnres — user's default browser options. 🎛️

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📂 FILES 📂

• cntlist, cntlist.rev — file of combined semantic concordance cntlist files. Used to assign sense numbers in the WordNet database. 🗂️

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

grind(1WN), wnintro(5WN), senseidx(5WN).

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 💖 this was WordNet 3.0, dated Dec 2006 — so yeah, she's vintage, she's iconic, she's still out here assigning sense numbers. go forth and tag responsibly. 🦋✨💅