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Big Huge Thesaurus API   6Feb08

I’ve just rolled out an API for the Big Huge Thesaurus. Need synonyms? Give the free API a try.

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6 Responses to “Big Huge Thesaurus API”

  1. dmitry sherman says:
    Posted 6 months ago

    Hey John, I’ve just tested the API or actually the dictionary itself; it has some lacks…
    it doesn’t strip the present progressive suffix ‘ing’ for some of the words(for instance ‘hosting’) and it doesn’t strip the past tense suffix ‘ed’(i.e ‘played’) (it’s only what i checked). Sometimes it provides results and I guess it happends because of manually added word forms. (’working’).
    For comparison the Oxford version in Babylon which which do the job.

    I thinkabout some client side processing for stripping, but what about the words that have special meaning in tense inflection ? Or what about the words that were already added?

  2. John says:
    Posted 6 months ago

    Good points. Thanks for letting me know your thoughts. I’ll probably add some of your suggestions especially re: tenses. I’m not sure about the ings though. Ideally each of those unique versions would be added to the dictionary. That is, hosting should be in the dictionary rather than just returning the listing for host.

  3. Avinash says:
    Posted 5 months ago

    I would like to make a suggestion: it would be really cool for the XML version to group the results into nouns, verbs etc and returns that to the user.

    eg.

    data1
    data2

    data3
    data4

  4. John says:
    Posted 5 months ago

    I’ve got that data. The reason it’s like this is that I was starting with the plain text output and didn’t want to complicate it and I wanted all the various output formats to match.

    For the XML output, I could add p=”noun” as an attribute for each word element. But for the plain text output? word,partofspeech? I don’t know. Then again, maybe the different formats don’t have to match…

  5. Rob says:
    Posted 5 months ago

    Very cool. It would be useful to me (read: willing to pay for access) if it did the following:

    1) Separated by type (noun, verb, adverb, etc.)

    2) Separated by tense (past, future, -ing, etc.)

    3) Prioritized by closest match to original keyword

    In other words, if I enter the word ‘recognize’, it returns a list like:
    accept
    accost
    accredit
    acknowledge
    address
    agnise
    agnize
    appreciate
    be
    call back
    call up
    certify
    cognise
    …

    It would be great if the ones at the top of the list were things like:
    acknowledge
    accredit
    appreciate

    Not sure how possible that would be, but I have my wallet out!

  6. John says:
    Posted 5 months ago

    For those of you following along, the API now:

    - searches harder to find a match by dropping common endings (ing, ed, s) when it can’t find an exact match.

    - has better error codes in the form of HTTP response codes

    - has a version 2 of the API with part of speech data

    - sorts results by “most common” words first

    And you can now purchase upgraded service directly from the site. See the API key request page for pricing.

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