Automatic Synonym Generator — live

The AutoSynGen tool from earlier this year is now live at:

http://intrepidkarthi.com/autosyngen/

Plug in a word. Get back a multiple-choice question with one correct synonym and four distractors. Repeat for any word that exists in the WordNet database.

what’s actually running

A small PHP frontend, a MySQL backend with a copy of the WordNet 3.0 synset tables, and the Minimal Path Length (MPL) heuristic from the original write-up. The header on every source file:

## index.php: Main page for Automatic Synonym Generator Tool
## Copyright (C) 2009 Madurai, Tamilnadu.
## Author: Karthikeyan NG (intrepidkarthi@gmail.com, www.intrepidkarthi.com)
## This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
## it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
## the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
## (at your option) any later version.

GPL 2 because the WordNet license requires the derivative tool to remain open. Source is on the deployment.

the live SQL

The query that does the actual synset lookup, lifted straight from the live index.php:

SELECT DISTINCT(s2.synset_id)
FROM   synset s1, synset s2
WHERE  s1.synset_id = s2.synset_id
  AND  s1.word = '<input>'
  AND  s2.word != '<input>'
ORDER BY s2.synset_id;

Find the synsets the input word lives in, list every other word in those synsets, and you have the candidate synonym pool. From there, the MPL filter gives you the not-quite-synonyms that make good distractors — words at MPL ≥ 4 are very wrong, MPL = 2-3 is the sweet spot for a “nearly right” answer.

try it

Type a word. Be. Live. Suffer. Endure. The example from the original spec works as advertised: the synonym chain is right there in the synset graph.

I’m keeping the tool up indefinitely. If you’re a teacher building a vocab quiz, take the script — GPL 2, modify it, redeploy it. The whole point of WordNet being free is that this stuff should be free too.

— Karthikeyan