Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery presents an automated method for creating a first-draft thesaurus from raw text. It describes natural processing steps of tokenization, surface syntactic analysis, and syntactic attribute extraction. From these attributes, word and term similarity is calculated and a thesaurus is created showing important common terms and their relation to each other, common verb--noun pairings, common expressions, and word family members. The techniques are tested on twenty different corpora ranging from baseball newsgroups, assassination archives, medical X-ray reports, abstracts on AIDS, to encyclopedia articles on animals, even on the text of the book itself. The corpora range from 40,000 to 6 million characters of text, and results are presented for each in the Appendix. The methods described in the book have undergone extensive evaluation. Their time and space complexity are shown to be modest. The results are shown to converge to a stable state as the corpus grows. The similarities calculated are compared to those produced by psychological testing. A method of evaluation using Artificial Synonyms is tested. Gold Standards evaluation show that techniques significantly outperform non-linguistic-based techniques for the most important words in corpora. Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery includes applications to the fields of information retrieval using established testbeds, existing thesaural enrichment, semantic analysis. Also included are applications showing how to create, implement, and test a first-draft thesaurus.

This detailed book is a “how-to” guide to building controlled vocabulary tools, cataloging and indexing cultural materials with terms and names from controlled vocabularies, and using vocabularies in search engines and databases to enhance discovery and retrieval online. Also covered are the following: What are controlled vocabularies and why are they useful? Which vocabularies exist for cataloging art and cultural objects? How should they be integrated in a cataloging system? How should they be used for indexing and for retrieval? How should an institution construct a local authority file? The links in a controlled vocabulary ensure that relationships are defined and maintained for both cataloging and retrieval, clarifying whether a rose window and a Catherine wheel are the same thing, or how pot-metal glass is related to the more general term stained glass. The book provides organizations and individuals with a practical tool for creating and implementing vocabularies as reference tools, sources of documentation, and powerful enhancements for online searching.

Publisher Description

Find the right word fast! This indispensable guide from America's Language Experts is the perfect tool for readers and writers! This all new edition of The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus features more than 150,000 word choices, including related words, antonyms, and near antonyms. Each main entry provides the meaning shared by the synonyms listed and abundant usage examples show words used in context. Words alphabetically organized for ease of use. A great complement to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and perfect for school, home, or office.

Webster's Fourth has been adopted by many magazines and newspapers as the definitive guide to the English language as spoken in America. Acclaimed for its 7000+ new words reflecting lifestyle changes, technology, and popular culture, the fourth edition contains 163,000 entries, with synonyms, so that it also functions as a thesaurus. Many entries put words into context as a further guide to understanding, and the dictionary includes 850 illustrations and maps and a world atlas. It's an excellent gift for students, and certainly for anyone who wants an up-to-date and easy-to-use reference for good writing and speaking.

Roget's Thesaurus of the Bible uses Roget's fundamental and brilliant category concept, which groups together all related subjects - similar and opposite - for quick and easy comparisons. If you are researching a particular subject, the category list will lead you to the relevant Bible passages. If you are researching a particular passage, the index of Bible verses will lead you to the appropriate category. As a study tool, this resource is unique. Even the browser will be rewarded with the discovery of related subjects and Bible passages for further exploration. Unlike concordances, this book is not tied to the language of any one Bible version. Nor is it based on a particular theological system. The Bible passages in this book are not from any one version of the Bible, but are paraphrases by Colin Day. In compiling the work, the most popular English translations were used - the Revised Standard Version, New International Version, and New American Standard - with references to the original Hebrew and Greek texts.