Smart alias insertion

Plugins ideas
1

Let’s say I have a note called Love

It would be useful to have the ability to automatically insert all forms of that word as aliases, e.g., loved, loves. loving

It would also be useful to automatically insert synonyms of the word as aliases, e.g., affection, fondness, compassion

Finally, if all variants of the synonyms could also be included as aliases, e.g., affections, fond, compassionate

This could of course be problematic in some ways. I chose Love as an example of a word which has synonyms that are perhaps not semantically exact. For this reason, a final functionality would be desirable.

Perhaps on executing the command to insert synonyms and variants of filename as aliases a window of sorts opens which allows you to choose the synonyms you want to be included so as to avoid unintentional linking to only semi-related or sometimes unrelated concepts. After synonym selection, variants of each word and of the filename are automatically included.

The reason I believe this is useful is that it has the potential to increase note discovery by using the backlinks/outgoing links function. It is also more efficient than manually entering aliases or copying and pasting synonyms from a thesaurus entry. Furthermore, many languages have several conjugations and declensions, which would support workflow efficiency for the users/learners of these languages.

Alternative

An alternative could be “Smart/Fuzzy Aliases”. Perhaps instead of selecting aliases in a sort of window or popout dropdown menu, aliases could be suggested “smartly”. For example, if I have a note called Love but the aliases line is empty, Obsidian could automatically suggest aliases when typing [[ OR by using the Various Complements plugin when initiating a match.

The potential utility could, I believe, be epic.

Related Requests

  • Edit: Adding a link to Query Expansion; thanks @Vype!
  • Edit: Thanks to above, I discovered this query expansion tool. Perhaps somebody much smarter than me can leverage this for Obsidian aliases?
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I’m evaluating Roam and Obsidian. In Obsidian, I can create a page called “darwin” and it will find and link all the pages that contain any substring of the word (even different capitalization). For example “darwinism”, “Darwinism”, “zzzzdArWiNzzz” will all be linked.

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I am converting a book (plain text) into set of Obsidian pages where each relevant term of that book has a link to its definition with list of all synonyms (aliases). The target is to create kind of local “Obsidian Wikipedia” with all information in that book. I want to understand that book, which contains many new tricky terms, so this approach helps me to collect all terms and their synonyms / aliases.
I am writing into this thread because the topic of this thread is very similar to problems I had to solve during “wikipedizing” of that book. Actually after about 3 days of work I have about 1700 links to about 150 terms (Obsidian notes).

At the beginning I soon recognized that manual creation of aliases is boring and slow. And because I am a developer and I love Obsidian a lot, I implement an Obsidian plugin for that. There is no automatic creation of synonyms from an dictionary or creation word forms by an language dependent tool in that plugin, but it greatly helped me to create all the aliases manually quite quickly. I believe it makes sense for you to give it a try.

It is now in code review process, and tested by me only. If you have similar needs and want to give it a try then here is the obsidian-link-with-alias GitHub repository, which contains release which can be manually installed into Obsidian. Let me know if you have any problems with that by creating an issue in that GitHub repository.

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Looks promising! And as you said, will def speed up creating aliases/links in my case too!
Thank you!!

Just one note, you gif from the README is a bit confusing tbh :smiley:
Why are there 3 szenes without explination for each going on at the same time?

image
image1148×914 55.4 KB

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Thanks for feedback! I just pushed improved documentation with all use cases described and followed by an individual animated GIF. Better? :grinning:

By the way the Link with alias plugin was accepted today, so it is now available directly in Obsidian :tada:

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Oh jeah, nice :smile::confetti_ball:

What’s the plugin-count now btw, did you break the 1.000 number? :smile:

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I need this! Would me much easier to use the unlinked mentions feature!

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This is such a great idea for a plugin. Right now I use a combo of the WordNet plugin and WordNik to hack some of this together. Having aliases populate like this automatically could save hours of time.

2 Likes