Olha só que idéia interessante do Phil Agre

[Imre Simon <is@ime.usp.br>]

Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 06:15:25 -0800
From: Phil Agre <pagre@alpha.oac.ucla.edu>
To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" <rre@lists.gseis.ucla.edu>
Subject: [RRE]notes and recommendations

...

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Wish list.  I want an automatic vocabulary extender.  This program
would analyze the writing of many thousands or millions of people,
at their request of course, to determine everyone's vocabulary.
Then it would compare people's vocabulary lists and suggest the
next words that each person might want to add to their repertoire.
So, for example, if I use a certain list of words and you use all
of those same words plus a few more, then I might get a message with
definitions and usage examples of those extra words.  Dictionaries
would be annotated to distinguish between words that are broadly
useful -- such as the hundreds of Latin adjectives and verbs --
and those that are more specialized -- such as botanical terms.
If you and I have the same interests except that you also write about
plants, then it wouldn't make sense to recommend that I use the word
"rhododendron".  I probably know what "rhododendron" means already,
but because I am uninterested in plants I never have any occasion
to use it.  But I might be interested to know that I have never used
the words "conflate" or "ingenuous".  It probably wouldn't take more
than a half-dozen markers on each word to determine which vocabulary
differences between people are worth flagging.  A more advanced
analysis might look up the thesaurus entry for words that I overuse
relative to people with otherwise similar vocabulary profiles, but
that would be a lot harder, since many of those words are keywords
in particular intellectual, political, and cultural traditions, for
which synonyms won't do.

**