ovos-skill-wordnet

WordNet skill for OpenVoiceOS. It adds a voice interface on top of ovos-wordnet-plugin, which handles all WordNet lookups, intent detection, and translation.

The skill supports three answer modes:

• Explicit intent handles utterances that name WordNet directly (for example, "ask wordnet about dog"). These always go to this skill. The plugin's built-in intent parser detects the relation type (definition, antonym, hypernym, and more) and returns a spoken-language response.
• Common Query handles dictionary-style questions through the OVOS Common Query pipeline. It competes with other knowledge skills and returns confidence 0.6 for definition matches.
• Fallback catches utterances that no other skill answers. The fallback handler intercepts utterances that match WordnetQuery.voc (dictionary and thesaurus keywords) and queries the plugin for an answer before OVOS says "I don't know".

Installation

pip install ovos-skill-wordnet

No API key is required. WordNet data downloads automatically on first use (about 30-60 MB for English) and stays cached locally. When no native gloss is available, the system translation plugin translates non-English definitions.

Answer modes

Explicit intent

These always route to this skill because they name WordNet explicitly:

• "Ask wordnet about dog"
• "Search word net for happy"
• "What does wordnet say about bank?"

The plugin detects which relation was asked (definition, antonym, hypernym, hyponym, holonym, lemma) and returns a natural-language response.

Common Query pipeline

When the Common Query pipeline plugin is active, this skill competes against other knowledge skills (for example, Wolfram Alpha or Wikipedia). Any bare definition query can win:

• "What is a dog?"
• "What does melancholy mean?"

Fallback

The fallback handler registers at priority 90. It only intercepts utterances that contain dictionary or thesaurus keywords (definition, antonym, synonym, meaning, opposite, hypernym, hyponym, and more). All other utterances pass through immediately, so unrelated fallbacks stay unaffected.

Supported languages

The skill supports 31 languages. Definitions are native for English (Open English WordNet 2024) and German (ODENet). All other languages use OMW 1.4 lemmas. Where a native definition is unavailable, the configured OVOS translation plugin translates the English definition.

Related projects

• OpenVoiceOS/ovos-wordnet-plugin does the WordNet lookups, intent detection, and translation that this skill exposes as a voice interface.
• OpenVoiceOS/ovos-common-query-pipeline-plugin routes dictionary-style questions to this skill and other knowledge skills.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.