Listening to cable news lately or wherever a politician looks to get free attention, you would think that English dictionaries have made the word intifada a synonym for genocide and those young, possibly somewhat naive college students yelling Intifada! are actually calling for Genocide! Those wanting to burnish their credentials as anti-elite (is that a synonym for pro-stupid?) are calling for the firing of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and other institutions known for providing the best education in the world. Why? Because they must be coddling students who lack the capacity to commit genocide (unlike the leaders of more than a few nations in history); students who have not even called for such leaders to do that. This is probably because their SAT scores (usually in the top 1% in the world) mean they know that intifada and genocide are not synonyms.
You can go to thesaurus.com to learn that, look in a dictionary, or even get a little more in-depth by reading Wikipedia where you learn what Intifada actually means. You might be shocked that the word genocide or any synonym for genocide does not appear in the Wikipedia entry for Intifada.
Oh, but the fans of alternative facts and conspiracy theories will claim that Wikipedia is for old people or it is biased or anyone can edit it (conveniently ignoring how quickly hordes of people will delete bizarre changes).
But being an NLP engineer I knew there are objective measures of word similarity. The two most popular data science NLP algorithms to measure word similarity, Word2Vec and GloVe, both have models trained on extremely large corpora to make this easy for anyone.
So first I used the 6 billion word corpus from Wikipedia and news articles from the New York Times, AP, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, and the English language versions of Agence France, Xinhua News Agency and Central News Agency that was trained by GloVe.
It found 4460 words more similar to intifada than genocide. GloVe gave the two words a similarity score of .14 (1=identical, -1 = opposite). For comparison, the words intifada and pi (the mathematical number) had a similarity score of .01. So, I guess genocide is a little more similar to intifada than the mathematical number PI. Congratulations demagogues???
When I used the much larger 100 billion word corpus from Google News, Word2Vec found 6,293 words/compound nouns more similar to intifada than any word or compound noun with genocide in it.
I found it interesting that in the 10,000 words/noun phrases most similar to genocide, the only word that had any relationship to Jews had to do with the Nazis. Nothing about Palestinians or Ivy League students. Maybe the demagogues hope to paint the Ivy League as a Nazi organization.
The simple Python code that anyone can run to show this:
The Computational Social Scientist 