Linguistics: Becoming Useful to Regular People?
January 8, 2020
Now here is the linguistic reference app I have been waiting for: IDEA’s “In Other Words.” Finally, an online resource breaks the limiting patterns left over from book-based resources like traditional dictionaries and thesauri. The app puts definitions into context by supplying real-world examples from both fiction and nonfiction works of note from the 20th and 21st centuries. It also lets users explore several types of linguistic connections. Not surprisingly, this thoroughly modern approach leverages a combination of artificial and human intelligence. Here is how they did it:
“Building on the excellent definitions written by the crowd-sourced editors at Wiktionary, IDEA’s lexicographic team wrote more than 2,700 short, digestible definitions for all common words, including ‘who,’ ‘what,’ and ‘the.’ For over 100k other words that also have Wikipedia entries, we included a snippet of the article as well. To power the app, our team created the IDEA Linguabase, a database of word relationships built on an analysis of various published and open source dictionaries and thesauri, an artificial intelligence analysis of a large corpus of published content, and original lexicographic work. Our app offers relationships for over 300,000 terms and presents over 60 million interrelationships. These include close relationships, such as synonyms, as well as broader associations and thousands of interesting lists, such as types of balls, types of insects, words for nausea, and kinds of needlework. Additionally, the app has extensive information on word families (e.g., ‘jump,’ ‘jumping’) and common usage (‘beautiful woman’ vs. ‘handsome man’), revealing words that commonly appear before or after a word in real use. In Other Words goes beyond the traditional reference text by allowing users to explore interesting facts about words and wordplay, such as common letter patterns and phonetics/rhymes.”
The team has endeavored to give us an uncluttered, intuitive UI that makes it quick to look up a word and easy to follow a chain of meanings and associations. Users can also save and share what they have found across devices. Be warned, though—In Other Words does not shy away from salty language; it even points out terms that were neutral in one time period and naughty in another. (They will offer a sanitized version for families and schools.) They say the beta version is coming soon and will be priced at $4.99, or $25 with a custom tutorial. We look forward to it.
Cynthia Murrell, January 8, 2020
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