Is there a way to get definitions for words from specific dictionaries?

ilivni870

Hi - I am building an app that requires domain specific definitions. Is there a way to access only definitions from "A Dictionary of Computer Science"?.

Thanks

AmosDuveen

Hi @ilivni870 ,

At the moment, the focus of the API project is to provide an accessible resource of general-purpose dictionaries, such as the Oxford Dictionary of English. This may change as the project develops but we will be guided by demand; I will make a note of it for our development team to consider, however, I suspect they currently have more pressing priorities.

AmosDuveen

Hi @ilivni870,

A second thought regarding your process: have you considered using our filtered word list endpoint? I was thinking something along the lines of collecting a list of words tagged as belonging to a given domain ( e.g. for computing: https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com:443/api/v1/wordlist/en/domains=Computing) then, as a second stage, using the output list of headwords as a basis for future definition calls.

AmosDuveen

You're welcome.

The second choice was just a really easy way to experiment to see what is available, rather than something which could be incorporated into an app.

Simone

Hey @ilivni870 - let me forward your question to the right person in the technical team, so bear with me!

ilivni870

Thanks for the response. The hackish way I am doing this at the moment is brute force i.e

 for sense_index, sense in enumerate(entry['senses']):
     #print(sense.keys())
     domain = sense.get('domains', [])
     print('Domain ',domain)
     print('Definition ',sense.get('definitions', []))

    # Disambiguation
       if 'Computing' in domain or len(result['lexicalEntries'])==1 :
          # Do Something ...

Nice Product. Fair accessibility limits and pricing for experimenting and scaling. Although it would be great to have some more specific code examples e.g. parse JSON response to pandas (python) or any other tabular form, in one place.

ilivni870

Quick thought - is there a method to get a list of all domains from Oxford? This way I have to experiment less with what definitions are acceptable.

Simone

Hi @ilivni870 let me ask my colleagues again - good that you included the code in your comment, that always helps!

AmosDuveen

Hi @ilivni870,

Yes, there is. We have a selection of 'utility' endpoints which allow developers to collect all this sort of metadata content. To deal with your specific query, you can make a call to "https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com:443/api/v1/domains/en" (note the language component at the end as each language dataset has different domain labels).

To deal with the broader issue of what else is possible, I recommend browsing the developer portal, which shows you all of the possible endpoints, languages and filters etc., including the utility section at the bottom of the page. Note that, although this site constructs a request URL for you, you will need to change the hostname slightly as it is hosted on a parallel site for security reasons.

ilivni870

Thanks @AmosDuveen. I actually like the first choice better
"https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com:443/api/v1/domains/en"