Separate word lists for nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc

Question

Usually word lists are 1 file that contains everything, but are there separately downloadable noun list, verb list, adjective list, etc?

I need them for English specific

Answer 1

As others have suggested, the WordNet database files are a great source for parts of speech. That said, the examples used to extract the words isn't entirely correct. Each line is actually a "synonym set" consisting of multiple synonyms and their definition. Around 30% of words only appear as synonyms, so simply extracting the first word is missing a large amount of data.

The line format is pretty simple to parse (search.c, function parse_synset), but if all you're interested in are the words, the relevant part of the line is formatted as:

NNNNNNNN NN a NN word N [word N ...]

These correspond to:

• Byte offset within file (8 character integer)
• File number (2 character integer)
• Part of speech (1 character)
• Number of words (2 characters, hex encoded)
• N occurrences of...
  • Word with spaces replaced with underscores, optional comment in parentheses
  • Word lexical ID (a unique occurrence ID)

For example, from data.adj:

00004614 00 s 02 cut 0 shortened 0 001 & 00004412 a 0000 | with parts removed; "the drastically cut film"

• Byte offset within the file is 4614
• File number is 0
• Part of speech is s, corresponding to adjective (wnutil.c, function getpos)
• Number of words is 2
  • First word is cut with lexical ID 0
  • Second word is shortened with lexical ID 0

---

A short Perl script to simply dump the words from the data.* files:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while (my $line = <>) {
    # If no 8-digit byte offset is present, skip this line
    if ( $line !~ /^[0-9]{8}\s/ ) { next; }
    chomp($line);

    my @tokens = split(/ /, $line);
    shift(@tokens); # Byte offset
    shift(@tokens); # File number
    shift(@tokens); # Part of speech

    my $word_count = hex(shift(@tokens));
    foreach ( 1 .. $word_count ) {
        my $word = shift(@tokens);
        $word =~ tr/_/ /;
        $word =~ s/\(.*\)//;
        print $word, "\n";

        shift(@tokens); # Lexical ID
    }
}

A gist of the above script can be found here.
A more robust parser which stays true to the original source can be found here.

Both scripts are used in a similar fashion: ./wordnet_parser.pl DATA_FILE.