WikiSynonyms: Find synonyms using Wikipedia redirects by Panos Ipeirotis.
Many many years back, I worked with Wisam Dakka on a paper to create faceted interfaced for text collections. One of the requirements for that project was to discover synonyms for named entities. While we explored a variety of directions, the one that I liked most was Wisam’s idea to use the Wikipedia redirects to discover terms that are mostly synonymous.
Did you know, for example, that ISO/IEC 14882:2003 and X3J16 are synonyms of C++? Yes, me neither. However, Wikipedia reveals that through its redirect structure.
This rocks!
Talk about an easy path to populating variant names for a topic map!
Complete with examples, code, suggestions on hacking Wikipedia data sets (downloaded).