Increase Word density - William Shakespeare Thesaurus cont.
We learned how to fetch words using Index but there is another option that I didn’t mention.
This function does exactly what it says. It will use the index, load synonyms from the
dictionary, then take those synonyms and find synonyms for them.
This drastically improve density of words of certain degree. But it also takes a long
time. In fact it is a bit never-ending process, because once you finish, there would be
already more synonyms added.
Consider the word happy. The function needs to have the synonyms for happy already
in the dictionary - to get theme there you can use Lookup Single entry or Lookup with
Index.
But then it will take each word you see on the left, like joyful, thrilled and finds a whole
list of synonyms for them.
As you could imagine, it does take a long time to go through all the words of words. We
are talking about thousands of items just starting from word happy. And they would be
all somehow related to that - so it marginally increases the ‘happiness” of our
dictionary. There would be a lot of words of that same feel added.
Hence we are increasing density.
If you try this function on a large index, like we did previously, you will soon realize that you are not going to wait just days. Probably
months.
Therefore, this function is best used with a very limited index.
Let’s go back to our Shakespeare.
We will look at the word crawling.
It has many interesting synonyms and so far
these are all Shakespearean.
But maybe there are more words Shakespeare
use, except we don’t know, because we are
essentially looking at the right side of the
thesaurus,, while searching the thesaurus with
words on the left side (like crawling)
Again and again, as mentioned many times before, we could take a word from Hamlet, then lookup synonyms, but these would be worthless
for a Shakespearean Thesaurus, because those would not be Shakespearean synonyms. Those would be English synonyms. We need the
opposite. We need to type an English word and get Shakespearean language. This is a chicken-egg problem, we need Shakespearean
dictionary in order to build one.
So you see the problem is not trivial. The question is - what other English words would give use synonyms that Shakespeare would use?
The vocabulary synthetizer did a lot of work for us. But there could be other hidden words. Even if not, we still need to explain the Synonyms
of Synonyms function.
To build a very focused index, we can use
Grab Index from Entry button.
This will take the words you see on the right
and make a small index from them.
Now we can start Synonyms of Synonyms function on this very limited index
So it will take word ‘moving’ and grabs synonyms from the dictionary or web (we should
have it, it is a common word). It then grabs these words and start fetching synonyms for
them (if they are missing in the dictionary)
Using this process, we of course now ruined the Shakespearean dictionary with many non-Shakespearean entries added as entries on the
left side. Words like voyage would expand into many other words that would be never used at that time.
But this is only a temporary setback. Using Synonyms of Synonyms we expanded the whole group of words related to ‘crawling’ into
hundreds of new entries. Now we would need to prune them.
So when all is done, we could now load a new index - the entire 40k word Complete works of William Shakespeare and then use the
Remove all synonyms…
This would undo most of the words we just added, so it isn’t very efficient way of getting
words, but we are hoping a few of the new entries would stick, but now entirely populated
with Shakespeare-only words.
In general, this brute-force is not the best way to use this function. (We are strictly looking for Shakespeare only words)
It is more suited to expand dictionary of a certain group of words where we are not too worried about bad and good words.
A better example may be expanding a Thematic Dictionary with a certain word group, for example all related to swords. All we need is one
good entry with a lot of sword-related synonyms, then run the Synonyms of Synonyms function and it will eventually fetch all there would be
to fetch.
