Does anyone know of a "similar words or keywords" algorithm available in open source or via an API? I am looking for something sort of like a thesaurus but smarter.
So for example:
intel
returns:
processor,
i7 core chip,
quad core chip,
.. etc
Any ideas or even something to point me in the right direction in C#?
I would love to hear your thoughts, but why cant we just use the Google Adwords API to generate keywords relevant to those entered?
There is no algorithm for such a thing. You are going to have to acquire data for a Thesaurus, and load it into a data structure then it is a simple dictionary lookup (you can use the C# Dictionary class for that). Maybe you can look at Wordnet, or Moby Thesaurus as a source for data. Other options are using a Thesaurus server and getting the information online as needed.
Why not send a search query out to Google and parse what it returns?
Also, check out Google Sets.
You will need a large database containing this information. The rest is simple - look up the input and see what releated words are stored.
The hard part is generating the database. Doing it manually might take years if you want to cover a large number of words and topics.
Generating it is surly non-trivial. Maybe you could try to download web pages and analyze words frequently appearing together, but I assume this will still take months to build, tune, and finally gather good quality data. Maybe extracting links from Wikipedia might be a good source of information because of its semi-structure.
I've made the open office thesaurus functions available for .NET in the NHunspell project. You can use the OO Thesaurus files. Here is the NHunspell Project