Adding Synonyms

Synonyms associate two or more words that have the same meaning. Synonyms are often also used to group terms with their abbreviations or to group commonly misspelled words with the correct spelling. By using synonyms, the frequency for the target concept is greater, which makes it far easier to discover similar information that is presented in different ways in your text data.

The linguistic resource templates and libraries delivered with the product contain many predefined synonyms. However, if you discover unrecognized synonyms, you can define them so that they will be recognized the next time you extract.

The first step is to decide what the target, or lead, concept will be. The target concept is the word or phrase under which you want to group all synonym terms in the final results. During extraction, the synonyms are grouped under this target concept. The second step is to identify all of the synonyms for this concept. The target concept is substituted for all synonyms in the final extraction. A term must be extracted to be a synonym. However, the target concept does not need to be extracted for the substitution to occur. For example, if you want intelligent to be replaced by smart, then intelligent is the synonym and smart is the target concept.

If you create a new synonym definition, a new target concept is added to the dictionary. You must then add synonyms to that target concept. Whenever you create or edit synonyms, these changes are recorded in synonym dictionaries in the Resource Editor. If you want to view the entire contents of these synonym dictionaries or if you want to make a substantial number of changes, you may prefer to work directly in the Resource Editor. See the topic Substitution/Synonym Dictionaries for more information.

Any new synonyms will automatically be stored in the first library listed in the library tree in the Resource Editor view—by default, this is the Local Library.

Note: If you look for a synonym definition and cannot find it through the context menus or directly in the Resource Editor, a match may have resulted from an internal fuzzy grouping technique. See the topic Fuzzy Grouping for more information.

To Create a New Synonym

 In either the Extraction Results pane or Data pane, select the concept(s) for which you want to create a new synonym.

 From the menus, choose Edit > Add to Synonym > New. The Create Synonym dialog box opens.

 Enter a target concept in the Target text box. This is the concept under which all of the synonyms will be grouped.

 If you want to add more synonyms, enter them in the Synonyms list box. Use the global separator to separate each synonym term. See the topic Options: System Tab for more information.

 Click OK to apply your changes. The dialog box closes and the Extraction Results pane background color changes, indicating that you need to reextract to see your changes. If you have several changes, make them before you reextract.

To Add to a Synonym

 In either the Extraction Results pane or Data pane, select the concept(s) that you want to add to an existing synonym definition.

 From the menus, choose Edit > Add to Synonym > . The menu displays a set of the synonyms with the most recently created at the top of the list. Select the name of the synonym to which you want to add the selected concept(s). If you see the synonym that you are looking for, select it, and the concept(s) selected are added to that synonym definition. If you do not see it, select More to display the All Synonyms dialog box.

 In the All Synonyms dialog box, you can sort the list by natural sort order (order of creation) or in ascending or descending order. Select the name of the synonym to which you want to add the selected concept(s) and click OK. The dialog box closes, and the concepts are added to the synonym definition.