Papers › Implementing a Reverse Dictionary, based on word definitions, using a Node-Graph Architecture

Implementing a Reverse Dictionary, based on word definitions, using a Node-Graph Architecture

31 May 2016COLING 2016 12arXiv:1606.00025archive 2025-07-28

Sushrut Thorat, Varad Choudhari

In this paper, we outline an approach to build graph-based reverse dictionaries using word definitions. A reverse dictionary takes a phrase as an input and outputs a list of words semantically similar to that phrase. It is a solution to the Tip-of-the-Tongue problem. We use a distance-based similarity measure, computed on a graph, to assess the similarity between a word and the input phrase. We compare the performance of our approach with the Onelook Reverse Dictionary and a distributional semantics method based on word2vec, and show that our approach is much better than the distributional semantics method, and as good as Onelook, on a 3k lexicon. This simple approach sets a new performance baseline for reverse dictionaries.

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