WordNet: A Lexical Database for the English Language
- 15th March 2005
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This is a little off my usual topics but I've just started a contract with a really interesting company called Wordtracker out in Kentish Town and my orientation has led me off in some unexpected directions.
So. How's this for a mental tool: WordNet? Pick any word. Anything at all. Pop it in the box and when the search comes back it'll have a dropdown with a set of options: synonyms, hypernyms, holonyms... and loads more, all calculated by pattern matching library texts. I can't even begin to imagine how you'd set about putting something like this together! And it's open source so you can download it and run it locally... Think of the implications for a search facility. Someone types in a search term. Is that exact word mentioned on your site? What about similar words that your users might be interested in? Run that search through WordNet, run the results through the search, weight them but relevance and you're on the way to having an incredibly powerful and useful search engine. Or how about generating related links? You could create a relationship-based site map and navigation by live-analysing your pages. Pages that use similar verbs could gravitate towards each other... These are lightweight uses compared to the what the chaps here have in mind and what the software is capable of but the possibilities for websites alone are facinating.
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