I'm developing a Ruby on Rails application need some advanced search engine functionality: specifically, I want to generalize a search term, for example:
apple => fruit
or
palates => exercise
Obviously, this is a pretty huge undertaking in hardcoding, so I was wondering if there's anything already out there, maybe in the form of a gem, that can help me generalize a search term?
I don't yet have a specific answer, since this is a pretty large problem, but the idea I had, which is what I'm probably going to go with is to use Wikipedia, either through the API or by using mechanize (http://workingwithrails.com/rubygem/4604-mechanize).
Wikipedia seems like it would be a good solution for this: after all, most of the first sentences of articles start off with a definition (e.g. Gatorade is a ), so it seems that I would be able to solve this problem this way.