Emo, Love, and God: Making Sense of Urban Dictionary, a Crowd-Sourced Online Dictionary
Table 2: Headword comparison between UD and Wiktionary. The table reports the unique number of headwords in each category. No threshold was applied.
['Overlap', '[BOLD] No processing 93,167', '[BOLD] No processing (4%)', '[BOLD] All lowercase 112,762', '[BOLD] All lowercase (5%)', '[BOLD] Mixed 108,361', '[BOLD] Mixed (5%)']
Because of the inconsistent capitalization in UD, we experiment with three approaches to match the headwords between both dictionaries: no preprocessing, lower casing of all characters, and mixed. The number of unique headwords in UD is much higher and the lexical overlap is relatively low. Sometimes there is a match on the lexical level (i.e. the headwords match), but UD or Wiktionary cover different or additional meanings. For example, phased is described in UD as ’something being done bit by bit – in phases’, a meaning also covered in Wiktionary. However, UD also describes several other meanings, including ’A word that is used when your asking if someone wants to fight.’ and ’to be "buzzed. " when you arent drunk, but arent sober.’.