While on the topic of Ruby-WordNet, you may want to fix a little bug in convertdb.rb, line 183: Where it says if (entries % CommitThreshold).nonzero? it should be if (entries % CommitThreshold).zero? The idea is to have the db commit on every 2000th record, not on every record _but_ the 2000th ones. I went through a weekend of headaches before I found that out ;). You will also get a warning on line 348, where StringScanner#empty? is obsolete (in favor of #eos?).