Software learns new words from Wikipedia

September 6, 2006 | Source: NewScientist.com news service

A program that works out the meaning of newly coined words using the online encyclopedia Wikipedia could help machines understand the slang used in blogs and other informal texts.

The program, called Zeitgeist, hunts through Wikipedia looking for entries about new words that do not appear in an online resource called WordNet, an official linguistics tool that is both a dictionary and a thesaurus.