A Retrospective view of Synonymy and Semantic Classification

Karen Sparck Jones' Cambridge PhD thesis of 1964 has had an interesting and unusual history. Entitled Synonymy and Semantic Classification (henceforth SSC) it was reproduced only in the simple mimeo book form then used by the Cambridge Language Research Unit where she worked. It was finally published in 1986, in an Edinburgh University Press series. Even that late publication managed to be ahead of a great deal of later work that recapitulates aspects of it, usually from ignorance of its existence. There is no doubt that SSC was developing statistical and symbolic techniques for the use of what we now call language resources so far ahead of other work that it was almost impossible for contemporary researchers to understand the book or to relate it to their own activity. At the time SSC was being written, Olney and Revard (1968) were exploring the content of Webster's Third Dictionary quantitatively on punched cards at Systems Development Corporation (where Sparck Jones also was by chance at the time and joined in their work with her 1967) and their work met a similar lack of reception, it, too, being twenty to thirty years ahead of its time.