Wolfram Alpha Blog : Yes, That’s Dumb—A Lexicographic Footnote

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/24/yes-thats-dumb-a-lexicographic-footnote/

by ujal • 17 years ago

44 12 17 years ago

blog.wolframalpha.com

lunchbox• 17 years ago

It would be cool if Wolfram Alpha incorporated functionality from Princeton's Wordnet Database:

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

Screenshot: http://minimalism.linguistics.arizona.edu/~sandiway/wnconnec...

As you can see from the screenshot, it allows you to map all kinds of relationships between words (e.g. taxonomies).

I always found WordNet to be an amazing tool, albeit one that could use some UX work.

programnature• 17 years ago

That is actually what is being used here.

Wordnet is one of the sources for the WordData[] function. http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/WordData.html

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

The blog entry shows very well what Wordnet synsets are good for. Synonyms are not transitive, but neither are they just relationships between two words. I think Synonym nets should be renamed. They are something very different.

cool-RR• 17 years ago

Why doesn't Alpha let you actually browse the synonym network? Why does it show the sixth-level relative of a word but won't let me see all of its immediate synonyms?

rabidsnail• 17 years ago

nltk has been around for some time now and provides much richer functionality for this sort of thing.

Mongoose• 17 years ago

Wolfram|Alpha: statistical, linguistic analysis... now with computational racism!

dxjones2• 17 years ago

Interesting, ... the synonym network containing "black" contains 26,330 words.

The entire English language must be partitioned into "K" non-overlapping synonym networks. What is the value of "K" ?

I wonder if K = 2, ... and the other synonym network contains "white".

If K > 2, then how many words are in the "white" synonym network, and what other words are not connected with "black" or "white" ?

Whatever K is, it must be relatively small, since there are only so many words in the language, and the synonym networks seem rather large.

mblakele2• 17 years ago

What about "ash"? I'd expect that to be in both networks: in "black" as a synonym for "coal" or "cinder", and in "white" as a form of "ashen", "pale", etc.

More widely, why must there be K non-overlapping networks that cover the entire language? Naively, I'd expect an unbounded number of non-overlapping small networks. But the two ideas of "Basic English" and of specialized vocabularies lead me to posit that every "significant" network (a network with a N number of members, where N > 5,000) overlaps with at least 1 other "significant" network. As a result, I would suspect that it would be difficult or impossible to find K non-overlapping sets that partition the entire language (where K is less than... oh, let's say 100).

jerf• 17 years ago

An unbounded number of networks would be made of an unbounded number of nodes in the minimal case, and I have a hard time describing the number of English words as "unbounded". If you apply the full power of Internet debate (now with extra axioms!) to the twisting and spinning of the term and streeeeetch the meanings as hard as you can, maybe you can get there, but not by any sane method.

dxjones2• 17 years ago

It is possible that "black" and "white" are in the same synonym network, perhaps linked by words like "ash". That would be amusing. Someone can check it on WolframAlpha.

The networks are "non-overlapping", because of the definition of a synonym network. You start with a seed word, and grow it until it stops growing. The English language is finite, so K must be finite. The example network containing "black" is large, so K is expected to be small, (unless there are a few large networks, and many tiny ones).

Finding K is not difficult at all. Pick a word, "black". Create the synonym network containing "black"and all words linked to it through the "synonym" relationship. Mark those words (roughly 26,000 of them) as "covered". K = 1.

Pick any other word not already covered. Grow the next synonym network. Mark those words covered. K = K + 1

Repeat until there are no words left.

K is the number of synonym networks.

wglb• 17 years ago

For a moment there I thought this was reddit-like Wolfram bashing.

Wolfram Alpha Blog : Yes, That’s Dumb—A Lexicographic Footnote

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