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Overlapping Thesaurus

Posted: 2010.10.18 (03:55)
by Amadeus
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.

Re: Overlapping Thesaurus

Posted: 2010.10.18 (04:45)
by 乳头的早餐谷物
I can't imagine what the overlap would be between 'style' and 'prose', but interesting idea.

Re: Overlapping Thesaurus

Posted: 2010.10.18 (05:07)
by t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư
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.

Re: Overlapping Thesaurus

Posted: 2010.10.18 (05:20)
by Radium
definitely a compelling conceptt