WantWords: An Open-source Online Reverse Dictionary System

Fanchao Qi, Lei Zhang, Yanhui Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
A reverse dictionary takes descriptions of words as input and outputs words semantically matching the input descriptions. Reverse dictionaries have great practical value such as solving the tip-of-the-tongue problem and helping new language learners. There have been some online reverse dictionary systems, but they support English reverse dictionary queries only and their performance is far from perfect. In this paper, we present a new open-source online reverse dictionary system named WantWords (https://wantwords.thunlp.org/). It not only significantly outperforms other reverse dictionary systems on English reverse dictionary performance, but also supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English cross-lingual reverse dictionary queries for the first time. Moreover, it has user-friendly front-end design which can help users find the words they need quickly and easily. All the code and data are available at https://github.com/thunlp/WantWords.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-demos.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
October
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Qun Liu, David Schlangen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
175–181
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-demos.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-demos.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fanchao Qi, Lei Zhang, Yanhui Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2020. WantWords: An Open-source Online Reverse Dictionary System. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 175–181, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WantWords: An Open-source Online Reverse Dictionary System (Qi et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-demos.23.pdf
Code
 thunlp/WantWords