7/24/2023 0 Comments Used in all contexts synonymThirty years ago, I led a software team that built one of the first online electronic thesaurus products, based on a Merriam-Webster thesaurus. The best way to interpret synonyms is that they are words that are interchangeable in at least some nontrivial contexts. John Lawler has added: Language doesn't have any use for two words that are exactly the same there's always contexts where you use one and not the other for some particular effect. (Though apparently, the shuffle is a type of dance.) There are some amusing candidates - tango, foxtrot, conga, jive, passacaglia, slosh. Probably, no two words are totally interchangeable (ignoring variants like artefact / artifact).Ĭoincidentally, I said to someone the other day, "I must be careful not to waltz off with the key." I then thought of possible substitutes for waltz in the pretty transparent idiom, and decided that I couldn't immediately think of any that are actually used. And when we get on to connotations, the same word will conjure up different nuances in different people. They will usually also have distinctly different senses. Sometimes, they'll bite you and you'll lose.I forget who said, "All words are infinitely polysemous," but it's probably also true that 'No words are truly synonymous.' Words will have some senses that largely overlap with those of other words, but not totally overlap. The data set is what it is - it's not perfect, and I can't afford enough computing power (or a big enough corpus) to try to make a better one. The actual opposite of "love" is probably something like "Arizona Diamondbacks", or "carburetor". The principle was articulated by John Rupert Firth, who wrote, "ou shall know a word by the company it keeps." So, "love" and "hate" may seem like opposites, but they will often score similarly. By "similarity", we really mean "used in similar contexts".Your word and the target word belong to different parts of speech.I added a checkbox to help you avoid this. SmartKey and some other keyboards stupidly ignore the autocapitalize settings that I have explicitly set in the HTML, and there does not seem to be anything I can do about this. This is why "leather" is far from "patent." Sometimes one usage is simply more popular (among newspaper reporters, which is the corpus): "display" is more often a verb than a noun, and its vector reflects this. Your guess, or the target word, is polysemous, and the meaning that is similar is rarely used.I can think of at least four reasons for this. There's a new word every day, where a day starts at midnight UTC. You will probably need dozens of guesses. (By "normal" words", I mean non-capitalized words that appears in a very large English word list there are lots of capitalized, misspelled, or obscure words that might be close but that won't get a ranking. If your word is not one of the nearest 1000, you're "cold". The "Getting close" indicator tells you how close you are -if your word is one of the 1,000 nearest normal words to the target word, the rank will be given (1000 is the target word itself). So if you want to know if the word is more like nice or Nice, you can ask about both. But I removed all but lower-case words from the secret word set, and if your word matches the secret word but for case, you win anyway. Don't get caught in the trap! Since our Word2vec data set contains some proper nouns, guesses are case-sensitive. It's tempting to think only of nouns, since that is how normal semantic word-guessing games work. Secret words may be any part of speech, but will always be single words. By "semantically similar", I mean, roughly "used in the context of similar words, in a database of news articles." The lowest in theory is -100, but in practice it's around -34. The highest possible similarity is 100 (indicating that the words are identical and you have won). The similarity value comes from Word2vec. Unlike that other word game, it's not about the spelling it's about the meaning. Semantle will tell you how semantically similar it thinks your word is to the secret word.
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