Overlapping Thesaurus
- Boeing Boeing Bone!
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- Joined: 2008.12.23 (05:44)
I'm not sure if this's been thought up yet or used, but while trying to find ways to vary my vocabulary on an online thesaurus, I thought of the idea of a thesaurus script that compares the synonyms of multiple words and picks only the overlap, to narrow down what word you're looking for. My example was I was searching for synonyms of "style" and "prose" for an essay comparing Allende and Garcia Márquez, and it was a pain to filter through synonyms like "fashion" for style and "poetry" for prose. But if a program took only the overlapping synonyms between the two, it would be able to find synonyms closer to what I was searching for.
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- La historia me absolverá
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I can't imagine what the overlap would be between 'style' and 'prose', but interesting idea.
M E A T N E T 1 9 9 2


- Retrofuturist
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This wouldn't be conceptually difficult to make, actually. For whatever your thesaurus source is (even if it's a webpage), it's a simple matter of keeping the synonyms as sets and taking the desired set intersections.
I'm a little surprised that there isn't a system like this in popular use already, come to mention it.
I'm a little surprised that there isn't a system like this in popular use already, come to mention it.
[spoiler="you know i always joked that it would be scary as hell to run into DMX in a dark ally, but secretly when i say 'DMX' i really mean 'Tsukatu'." -kai]"... and when i say 'scary as hell' i really mean 'tight pink shirt'." -kai[/spoiler][/i]


- Hawaii Five-Oh
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