I-RD: A Reverse Dictionary for English Idioms

Abstract

A traditional forward dictionary provides the meanings of words. In contrast to this, a Reverse Dictionary provides semantically appropriate words for a phrasal description of a concept in mind. It addresses the needs of the language producers viz. speakers and writers. In this paper, we have addressed the problem of Reverse Dictionary in the specific context of English idioms. We have considered the idiomatic expressions in our study owing to the fact that their usage in speech/text creates a spectacular illustration of the speaker's/writer's thought process and is an effective means of communication. We have adopted the architecture of Wordster Reverse Dictionary and build the i-RD, a Reverse Dictionary for English idioms. Specifically, for a given description in natural language, the i-RD generates an apt idiom for usage. The evaluation carried out for our implementation reports an accuracy of 70%. While this is satisfactory, we provide an insightful discussion on the limitations and future prospects of the current implementation.