Differences between Conceptnet5 and Babelnet

[clar...@meedan.com]

What are the main differences between Conceptnet and Babelnet (http://babelnet.org/) ?
Both are large knowledge networks build from Wikipedia, Wordnet, etc.
Please explain for me the differences between the projects.

Thank you.

[Rob Speer]

I haven't seen BabelNet before. It seems to have similar goals to ConceptNet and a much more polished Web interface. It's pretty well done. And it seems to make use of Roberto Navigli's work on word sense disambiguation to align a bunch of different resources on the same set of senses.

One difference in scope: I think BabelNet is focusing too specifically on dictionary definitions of words, not on their common-sense relationships to other words. If you look up "car" in BabelNet (http://babelnet.org/synset?word=bn:00007309n&details=1&lang=EN&orig=car), you won't find a single link to the word "drive", while you'll find three different relational links between them (UsedFor, ReceivesAction, and RelatedTo) in ConceptNet: http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/data/5.4/c/en/car

But the biggest difference is that BabelNet adds the Non-Commercial restriction to its data. This has some interesting implications:

* You can use BabelNet for a research project, but if you succeed and want to use it in a real product -- even in an open-source tool that meets the OSI definition at https://opensource.org/faq -- you have to negotiate a license with them.

* I think they're infringing Wikipedia's license by redistributing its content with added restrictions.

I don't think this is malicious on their part. I have found that academics often defensively add "non-commercial" restrictions to their work because they don't think about the implications, and because they're used to only working with other academics. It does concern me, though.

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[Rob Speer]

As I look in more detail at BabelNet, I see that they're at least making some effort to not infringe on Wikimedia's license, though I don't know if what they're doing is correct. Although every page says it's under a non-commercial license, you can mouse over Wikipedia or Wiktionary in their "sources" list and it'll give the correct license terms. The last downloadable version of their data (2.5) is also split up by what license it's under. However, it appears that the sense inventory is non-commercial only. Versions after 2.5 are not downloadable and can only be accessed through an API under a non-commercial agreement.

So here's my revised assessment of the differences between BabelNet and ConceptNet:

• You can always download and use the latest version of ConceptNet.
  
• ConceptNet is not restricted by what purpose you intend to use it for, and can be used in open-source projects.
  
• ConceptNet includes more crowd-sourced common-sense relationships between words, such as between "car" and "drive", or between "dog" and "pet". These relationships come from early crowd-sourcing projects such as Open Mind Common Sense and games with a purpose such as CMU's Verbosity. These make the data noisier but more complete.
  
• BabelNet has more specific word sense data.