wordnet 3.0 maximum depth of the taxonomy

Question

How can I know the maximum depth of the taxonomy for wordnet 3.0? (is-a relationships for synsets)

I read some papers and found from a paper that it is 16 for wordnet 1.7.1.

I'm wondering the value for wordnet 3.0.

Answer 1

You can try the wordnet interface in python nltk.

Iterate through each synset in wordnet and find the distance to their top most hypernym:

>>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet
>>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
>>> max(max(len(hyp_path) for hyp_path in ss.hypernym_paths()) for ss in wn.all_synsets())
20

To find the possible paths of a synset to its top most hypernym:

>>> wn.synset('dog.n.1')
Synset('dog.n.01')
>>> wn.synset('dog.n.1').hypernym_paths()
[[Synset('entity.n.01'), Synset('physical_entity.n.01'), Synset('object.n.01'), Synset('whole.n.02'), Synset('living_thing.n.01'), Synset('organism.n.01'), Synset('animal.n.01'), Synset('chordate.n.01'), Synset('vertebrate.n.01'), Synset('mammal.n.01'), Synset('placental.n.01'), Synset('carnivore.n.01'), Synset('canine.n.02'), Synset('dog.n.01')], [Synset('entity.n.01'), Synset('physical_entity.n.01'), Synset('object.n.01'), Synset('whole.n.02'), Synset('living_thing.n.01'), Synset('organism.n.01'), Synset('animal.n.01'), Synset('domestic_animal.n.01'), Synset('dog.n.01')]]

To find the maximum of one synset:

>>> max(len(hyp_path) for hyp_path in wn.synset('dog.n.1').hypernym_paths())
14