1. What are Synonyms?
A synonym is a word or phrase that represents the same meaning as another word or phrase. Words that are synonyms are described as synonymous. Synonyms are useful for fine-tuning your message, for literary variance, and for finding words that fit your context with the correct meaning.
(i) She is happy /glad.
Happy and glad are synonymous
(ii) Anna Woods studied/read German and Russian literature at Oxford.
Studied and read are synonymous
2. What are Stop Words?
Stop words are a set of regularly used words in any language, not just English. The reason why stop words are relevant to many applications is that, if we remove the words that are very commonly used in a particular language, we can focus on the important words instead.
For example, if your search query is ‘how to create a good customer relationship?’,
If the search engine tries to find web pages that contained the terms ‘how’, ‘to’, ‘create’, ‘a’, ‘customer’, ‘relationship’, the search engine is going to find a lot more pages that contain the terms ‘how’ and ‘to’ than pages that contain data about creating customer relationships because the terms ‘how’ and ‘to’ are so commonly used in the English language.
If we overlook these two terms, the search engine can focus on retrieving pages that include the keywords: ‘create’, ‘customer’, ‘relationship’ – which would bring up pages that are of importance.
3. What is its context in Software Technologies?
Let’s take a look at Engati’s Chatbot Building Platform
(i) Synonyms
From a bot and context relevancy, typical use-cases include your domain-specific synonyms. It can also be used for cases of abbreviations, common misspellings, and similar uses.
You can click on the “Add” button and add synonyms to your bot.
You can add more than one synonym by clicking the tab/enter key after each entry. The system finds matching synonyms and adds to your list, you can exclude these if you don’t find it suitable.
Engati also lets you add synonyms for any language apart from English in the exact same manner as you would have for English. All you have to do is select the other language while adding a new Synonym.
(ii) Stop words
Stop words are a set of frequently used words in a language. Some stop words in English are “a”, “the”, “is”, “are”, “and”, etc.
The reason behind using stop words is, by eliminating low information words from the text, we can concentrate on important words instead of the actual NLP.
Engati comes with a list of predefined stop words but it’s not unusual to see some domain or use case-specific stop words.
As an example, if the chatbot is to answer queries about various features of a product, it will be reasonable to include that particular product’s name itself as one of the Stopwords.
Click on the stop words tab to add/remove stopwords. These words are overlooked by NLP when matching FAQs to relevant responses. There are many stopwords pre-defined for a chatbot.
You can add more than one stopword by separating them by a comma (,).
