Building a Lexical Database for an Interactive Joke-Generator

As part of a project to construct an interactive program which will encourage children to play with language by building jokes, we have developed a large lexical database, closely based on WordNet. As well as the standard WordNet information about part of speech, synonymy, hyponymy, etc, we have added phonetic representations and symbolic links allowing attachment of pictures. All information is represented in a relational database, allowing powerful searches using SQL via a Java API. The lexicon has a facility to label subsets of the lexicon with symbolic names, and we are working to incorporate some educationally relevant word lists as sublexicons. This should also allow us to improve the familiarity ratings which the lexicon assigns to words.