1Artha(1) Artha - The Open Thesaurus Artha(1)
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6 Artha - An cross-platform thesaurus based on WordNet
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9 Artha is an open thesaurus based on the WordNet database, created with
10 simplicity in mind. Once executed, Artha monitors for a user preset
11 global hotkey combination. When the user selects some text in any win‐
12 dow, and presses this hotkey combo, Artha looks up WordNet thesaurus
13 for the selected text and pops-up with the results.
14 When executed for the first time Artha tries to register a hotkey auto‐
16 matically, in the order, Ctrl + Alt + [W or A or T or Q]. You can
17 view/change it via the 'Hotkey' button in the toolbar. It can also be
18 disabled.
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21 Definitions are categorized based on the PoS (Part of Speech - Noun,
22 Verb, Adjective and Adverb). Apart from showing the definitions/senses
23 of a searched string with usage examples, Artha also shows a word's
24 relatives like Synonyms, Antonyms, Derivatives, Pertainyms (Related
25 noun/verb), Attributes, Similar Terms, Domain/Domain Terms, Causes,
26 Entails, Hypernyms (is a kind of), Hyponyms (Kinds), Holonyms (is a
27 part of), Meronyms (Parts).
28 SENSES AND RELATIVES
30 A word can have more then one sense i.e. it can convey more than a sin‐
31 gle meaning/definition. Relative words are words that are related to
32 one or more senses of the searched word, by a relationship like Syn‐
33 onym, Derivative, etc. To know which all sense a relative is related
34 to, just select the it, the corresponding senses it maps to are high‐
35 lighted. As per WordNet, depending on the number of senses a word has
36 (polysemy count), it's familiarity is determined. It gets displayed
37 next to the PoS in the definition area. There are 7 types: extremely
38 rare, very rare, rare, uncommon, common, familiar, very familiar and
39 extremely familiar.
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42 Artha has 2 modes. Simple and Detailed. Artha enters Detailed mode when
43 the 'Detailed' button in the toolbar is pressed. When toggled again, it
44 returns back to simple mode. For relatives like Antonyms, Pertainyms,
45 Hypernyms, Hyponyms, Holonyms and Meronyms, where more than one level
46 of relatives may be present, is showed in a tree fashion, in detailed
47 mode. If in simple mode, only one level of relatives are shown even
48 when more levels are present. E.g. 'rich' has 'poor' and 'lean' alone
49 as antonyms in simple mode. While in detailed mode, 'poor' further
50 infers broke, skint, etc. which are shown as children of 'poor'.
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53 Regular expressions can be used to search for a term when you vaguely
54 know it and want to locate it in the thesaurus. Artha's regular expres‐
55 sion pattern closely follows Wildmat syntax by Rich Salz owing to its
56 simplicity.
57 * (wildcard) matches any number of (including 0) unknown charac‐
59 ters
60 ? (joker) matches one unknown character
62 [...] (range) matches one unknown character within the range
64 specified
65 {m, n} (limits) upper & lower limits of the number of characters
67 in a range
68 [^...] (not in the range) matches one unknown character NOT
70 within the range specified
71 EXAMPLES:
73 Expr. `cro*p` means the term you want to corner starts with
75 `cro` and ends with `p` while the number of characters in
76 between are unknown. It fetches crop, crop up, croup, crock up
77 and crow step.
78 Expr. `*chester` means the searched word ends with a `chester`
80 while the beginning and its number characters are unknown. It
81 fetches chester, manchester, rochester, winchester and toy man‐
82 chester.
83 Expr. `can????r` means the term sought starts with `can` and
85 ends with `r` while you are sure that there are 5 unknown char‐
86 acters in between. It fetches canister and cannular.
87 Expr. `andre*[x|y|z]` means the word searched for starts with
89 andre and ends with either an x or y or z, and there could be
90 any number of terms in betweem these. It fetches andre malraux,
91 andrei tarkovsky, andres martinez, etc.
92 Expr. `a[c|d|e]{2,}` means the word looked for starts with a and
94 then there are minimum 2 or more occurances of c, d or e. It
95 fetches acc, accede, ace, add, ade and aec.
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98 Should the user prefer passive desktop notifications (balloon tips),
99 rather than the application popping up with the definitions, it can be
100 done by enabling Notifications. This is done via the Notify tool button
101 or by right-clicking on Artha's system tray icon, and tick off the
102 'Notifications' check box in the menu. When notifications are enabled,
103 and the user selects text in a window and presses the hotkey combo,
104 Artha takes the prime definition of that term from WordNet and shows
105 that definition as a system tray notification.
106 Note: For the notifications feature to be present, notify library's
108 binary (libnotify.so.1) should be available on your system. If not,
109 Artha will not expose the feature at all. Also the notification-daemon
110 should installed for the notifications to show up.
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113 Suggestions is a feature that gives out possible near matches when a
114 misspelled word is searched for. To have this feature, your system
115 should have libenchant binary (libenchant.so.1) installed and an Eng‐
116 lish dict file for the spell engine to refer (locale doesn't matter).
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119 Artha has a World Wide Web site at http://artha.sourceforge.net. From
120 this web site users can know more about the Artha project and also
121 download its source and binary distributions for various distros.
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124 Sundaram Ramaswamy <legends2k@yahoo.com>
125Artha Apr 27, 2009 Artha(1)