1991:2 - Universitetet i Bergen

derivational information for 'data' as weI1 as a usnge note about the
acceptance now of 'dota' as a singular noun.
LM allows one ra use be '?' wiId card, standing for any singb
character in dicticinasy look-ups, When I asked for '?ho?' I got the
following words: ahoy. chop. chow, shod. shoe, shoo, shop, shot, show,
whorn, whop. There is no way lo request an unspecified nrrrnbcr of
unknown chnracters, so one could not request all words of any length
that end in -ence or -ance. AHED's wildcard feature is a separate
program, which I will describe below.
LM's dictionary offers the choice of inserting the current Itarget word
in an open appIication, by clicking an the 'replace' butron. To accomplish
this in AHED, one needs to use the srandard cut ond paste opcratians.
LM nlso allows the user to cut and paste entire definitions, or part of
a definition into an open application. AHED lirnits the copy function
to ona word at most, and some of the information in a dehition (like
the proriunciation guide or etymoIogy) is not copyabie.
Both packages offer thesauruses (or ?hcsauri,' as noted in the dictionarics).
In same fairly random tests, LM suggcsts morc words Ihan
AHED. For 'friendly,' AHED suggests 18 altesnntives (in feur scnse
groups) while LM lisk 55 words and phiases. Among hose, hawever,
are antonyms and contrastive werds (like bellicose, bel ligerent, combative,
con tentious. pugnacious, quarrefsome, antipalhetic, hostile, suspicious,
uncooperative) us wc11 as related words like empathic. syrnpathetic,
understanding, accordanr, agreeing. concordant, frictianless.
harmonlous, pacilic, pcaccablc, and peaceful. Park of specch are given
for each sense gmup listcd in the thesauruses as well as khe dictionaries.
LM claims to psovide 470,000 true synonyms for 40,000 entries; AHED
advertises that it offers more than 500,000 synonyms.
IE the user enters a word that the thesaurus doesn't recognizc, AHED
merely beeps. As a separate ctep, one may Ihen click on the dictionary
button, and have Phe word Iooked up. AHED then suggexts correct
speIlings. LM's thesaurus gives immediate feedback if a word is not
found, automatically suggesling alternatives. Surprisingly, the LM's
dictionary and thesaurus use different look-up algorithms for resolving
misspellings. The dictionary, for example, figured out I was trying to
write 'serious' when I typed 'senou.' The thesaunis was stumped.
The dictionary and thesaunis modules are as fm as LM gacs. The
deiinitions are cIear and helprul. The thcsaurus is cerlainly large enough
for most purposes. AHED torges ahrad with three aher u~ililies:
WildCard, Anagram, and SearchText.
WildCard extcnds LM's wildcard searching of the headwords in the
dicrionary by dlowing T?' to sund for any one charactcr and "*' to
stand far any number of characters, from none to 32, including spaces.
168 HUMANISETSKE DATA 291