NAME
Artha - An cross-platform thesaurus based on WordNet
DESCRIPTION
Artha is an open thesaurus based on the WordNet database, created with
simplicity in mind. Once executed, Artha monitors for a user preset
global hotkey combination. When the user selects some text in any
window, and presses this hotkey combo, Artha looks up WordNet thesaurus
for the selected text and pops-up with the results.
When executed for the first time Artha tries to register a hotkey
automatically, in the order, Ctrl + Alt + [W or A or T or Q]. You can
view/change it via the ’Hotkey’ button in the toolbar. It can also be
disabled.
DEFINITIONS
Definitions are categorized based on the PoS (Part of Speech - Noun,
Verb, Adjective and Adverb). Apart from showing the definitions/senses
of a searched string with usage examples, Artha also shows a word’s
relatives like Synonyms, Antonyms, Derivatives, Pertainyms (Related
noun/verb), Attributes, Similar Terms, Domain/Domain Terms, Causes,
Entails, Hypernyms (is a kind of), Hyponyms (Kinds), Holonyms (is a
part of), Meronyms (Parts).
SENSES AND RELATIVES
A word can have more then one sense i.e. it can convey more than a
single meaning/definition. Relative words are words that are related to
one or more senses of the searched word, by a relationship like
Synonym, Derivative, etc. To know which all sense a relative is related
to, just select the it, the corresponding senses it maps to are
highlighted. As per WordNet, depending on the number of senses a word
has (polysemy count), it’s familiarity is determined. It gets displayed
next to the PoS in the definition area. There are 7 types: extremely
rare, very rare, rare, uncommon, common, familiar, very familiar and
extremely familiar.
MODES
Artha has 2 modes. Simple and Detailed. Artha enters Detailed mode when
the ’Detailed’ button in the toolbar is pressed. When toggled again, it
returns back to simple mode. For relatives like Antonyms, Pertainyms,
Hypernyms, Hyponyms, Holonyms and Meronyms, where more than one level
of relatives may be present, is showed in a tree fashion, in detailed
mode. If in simple mode, only one level of relatives are shown even
when more levels are present. E.g. ’rich’ has ’poor’ and ’lean’ alone
as antonyms in simple mode. While in detailed mode, ’poor’ further
infers broke, skint, etc. which are shown as children of ’poor’.
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS BASED SEARCH
Regular expressions can be used to search for a term when you vaguely
know it and want to locate it in the thesaurus. Artha’s regular
expression pattern closely follows Wildmat syntax by Rich Salz owing to
its simplicity.
* (wildcard) matches any number of (including 0) unknown
characters
? (joker) matches one unknown character
[...] (range) matches one unknown character within the range
specified
{m, n} (limits) upper & lower limits of the number of characters
in a range
[^...] (not in the range) matches one unknown character NOT
within the range specified
EXAMPLES:
Expr. ‘cro*p‘ means the term you want to corner starts with
‘cro‘ and ends with ‘p‘ while the number of characters in
between are unknown. It fetches crop, crop up, croup, crock up
and crow step.
Expr. ‘*chester‘ means the searched word ends with a ‘chester‘
while the beginning and its number characters are unknown. It
fetches chester, manchester, rochester, winchester and toy
manchester.
Expr. ‘can????r‘ means the term sought starts with ‘can‘ and
ends with ‘r‘ while you are sure that there are 5 unknown
characters in between. It fetches canister and cannular.
Expr. ‘andre*[x|y|z]‘ means the word searched for starts with
andre and ends with either an x or y or z, and there could be
any number of terms in betweem these. It fetches andre malraux,
andrei tarkovsky, andres martinez, etc.
Expr. ‘a[c|d|e]{2,}‘ means the word looked for starts with a and
then there are minimum 2 or more occurances of c, d or e. It
fetches acc, accede, ace, add, ade and aec.
NOTIFICATIONS
Should the user prefer passive desktop notifications (balloon tips),
rather than the application popping up with the definitions, it can be
done by enabling Notifications. This is done via the Notify tool button
or by right-clicking on Artha’s system tray icon, and tick off the
’Notifications’ check box in the menu. When notifications are enabled,
and the user selects text in a window and presses the hotkey combo,
Artha takes the prime definition of that term from WordNet and shows
that definition as a system tray notification.
Note: For the notifications feature to be present, notify library’s
binary (libnotify.so.1) should be available on your system. If not,
Artha will not expose the feature at all. Also the notification-daemon
should installed for the notifications to show up.
SUGGESTIONS
Suggestions is a feature that gives out possible near matches when a
misspelled word is searched for. To have this feature, your system
should have libenchant binary (libenchant.so.1) installed and an
English dict file for the spell engine to refer (locale doesn’t
matter).
AVAILABILITY
Artha has a World Wide Web site at http://artha.sourceforge.net. From
this web site users can know more about the Artha project and also
download its source and binary distributions for various distros.
AUTHOR
Sundaram Ramaswamy <legends2k@yahoo.com>