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Wolfram Alpha Blog : Yes, That’s Dumb—A Lexicographic Footnote
- lunchbox 17y agoIt would be cool if Wolfram Alpha incorporated functionality from Princeton's Wordnet Database: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ Screenshot: http://minimalism.linguistics.arizona.edu/~sandiway/wnconnect/snapshotl.png 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 17y agoThat 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 http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/WordData.html
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoThe 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 17y agoWhy 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 17y agonltk has been around for some time now and provides much richer functionality for this sort of thing.
- Mongoose 17y agoWolfram|Alpha: statistical, linguistic analysis... now with computational racism!
- dxjones 17y agoInteresting, ... 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.
- mblakele 17y agoWhat 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 17y agoAn 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.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mblakele 17y agoOh, is English supposed to be sane? I hadn't noticed. You're right, of course: I was using "unbounded" in a loose fashion. There are a finite number of phonemes used in English, and I suppose there must be some upper limit to the number of phonemes in a word.
- wglb 17y agoFor a moment there I thought this was reddit-like Wolfram bashing.