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Doug is writing up an incident report to discuss what happened in his laboratory last night. All he told me was that it involved ethanol and a large electromagnet.
Doug needs a word similar to both "mangle" and "break". More explicitly, he needs a verb that both describes the action of changing
unsatisfactorily, and making some object no longer function.
He attempted using the reverse lookup dictionary, but he had a hard time constructing a definition to suit his needs. He would much rather enter two words into a web form, and have the computer do the work for him.
Such a service could be implemented by creating a map of relationships between lexemes. The search process would involve building a list of synonyms for the two queried words, and returning the intersection of lexemes that correlate with both words.
Reverse-lookup Online Dictionary
Reverse-lookup_20Online_20Dictionary
Doug tried to use this resource to solve his problem. [ed, Nov 29 2007]
Visual Thesaurus
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
I like this UI [hippo, Nov 29 2007]
Princeton WordNet
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
Perhaps this data set could be adapted [wiml, Nov 29 2007]
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Annotation:
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An excellent idea and very easy to implement.[+] For example, the results given from a search at thesaurus.com could be searched for a second term with very little additional code. You can kinda do it using CTRL+f. |
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The search could be made better by also looking at second level relationships if there are no results for the 2 terms you entered, ie, a word from each result have the same synonym. |
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My only concern is that the whole scenario behind this idea is a sham. It's really going to be used for inventive pun creation, isn't it?! |
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(Wow, [hippo]. That's a very smart bit of content presentation. I'm impressed.) |
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Yes, very nice, it allowed Tom to find the word "mutilate", which appears to fit Doug's requirements. |
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I would have settled for 'breangle', myself. There's nothing wrong with a good portmanteau, or goodmanteau. |
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Cool, now I just need to find a dictionary and look up lexemes. But even as a pun creation tool it is cool. |
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This is the 'six degrees of separation' graph traversal problem, although for sensible answers it has to be a three-step chain from Word A <-> target <-> Word B. |
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What's potentially more fun is any odd-numbered chain of the form Word A <-> Word A+1 <-> ... target ... Word B-1 Word B. |
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I might just code this up this evening for the fun of it - I have all the necessary tools. |
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