Matching jargon synonyms: This must be done by a human, but how can the human-entry part be optimized?

Question

Background: Customer X has two lists of words. None of these words exists in any corpus of text in any known language. They are purely proprietary jargon. The first list is a list of words owned by Organization X. The second list is a list of words owned by his closest competitor, Organization Y.

For a concrete example:

 Organization X             ;    Organization Y
 DynamicWiperSheening       ;    DeepShinerONE
 FrameNPinStripeBuff        ;    TireInfationImprover
 PressureJustLikePNU        ;    AppearanceImprover
 DeepShinerUNO              ;    WindshieldDeviceImprover

Customer X wants a list of all "jargon words" owned by Organization Y mapped onto his own list of Organization X jargon words. The reason is Organization X wants to woo away customers from Organization Y, and it will be much easier to do if he can translate his "jargon" into terms that existing customers of Y can understand easily.

Customer X has a trained employee who knows which jargon words count as synonyms, and he wants that employee to consult with a software developer so this list (thousands of entries long) can be converted into a PDF "glossary" of jargon terms mapped from one organization to another.

Problem: The problem is, no matter how you slice it, the job is going to have to be done by hand. Employee X is the only one who knows 100% what the correct jargon translation is, so it won't be possible to write software that maps the jargon and then creates a PDF. The PDF creation can be automated, but the jargon mapping cannot.

Question: Since there is no way with today's present technology to automate the jargon translation, what software would help Employee X do this mapping by hand? Is there any kind of software tool out there that would let the employee just draw a line from one word to another, and then save that to be handed off to the person who will write the PDF generator?

What's the best and fastest way to automate the part that cannot be automated?

Answer 1

I don't know of anything like that, and I'm not even sure that it would help. The simplest way I can think of handling it is just an excel spreadsheet: Column A is Organization X terms, column C is Organization Y. When he finds a match, cut'n'paste from col C to Col B.

Answer 2

here is a quick thought:

on a simple interface (thin/thick/whatever), you display all Company X terms in one long column. Right across you display a second column, and instead of values you display a "smart" dropdown.

by "smart dropdown" i mean that it is intelligent to take a few characters, do a quick search of all Company Y terms and load the dropdown with those items so that the employee can choose the item he needs. If you are feeling lazy just load the DropDown with ALL the Company Y terms and let the employee sift through the dropdown.

When the employee is done picking the equivalent terms in the dropdown, they click save. then you can create whatever is easier for you. it could be an XML file, a simple CSV file, fixed length file, etc

This is a fairly quick solution that will speed up the work of the employee; much faster than using excel IMO.