The semantic and stylistic differentiation of synonyms and near-synonyms. DiMarco, C., Hirst, G., & Stede, M. In AAAI Spring Symposium on Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, pages 114–121, Stanford CA, March, 1993.
abstract   bibtex   

If we want to describe the action of someone who is looking out a window for an extended time, how do we choose between the words gazing, staring, and peering? What exactly is the difference between an argument, a dispute, and a row? In this paper, we describe our research in progress on the problem of lexical choice and the representations of world knowledge and of lexical structure and meaning that the task requires. In particular, we wish to deal with nuances and subtleties of denotation and connotation—shades of meaning and of style—such as those illustrated by the examples above.

We are studying the task in two related contexts: machine translation, and the generation of multilingual text from a single representation of content. In the present paper, we concentrate on issues in lexical representation. We describe a methodology, based on dictionary usage notes, that we are using to discover the dimensions along which similar words can be differentiated, and we discuss a two-part representation for lexical differentiation.

@InProceedings{	  dimarco6,
  author	= {Chrysanne DiMarco and Graeme Hirst and Manfred Stede},
  title		= {The semantic and stylistic differentiation of synonyms and
		  near-synonyms},
  booktitle	= {AAAI Spring Symposium on Building Lexicons for Machine
		  Translation},
  address	= {Stanford CA},
  month		= {March},
  year		= {1993},
  pages		= {114--121},
  abstract	= {<P>If we want to describe the action of someone who is
		  looking out a window for an extended time, how do we choose
		  between the words <I>gazing</I>, <I>staring</I>, and
		  <I>peering</I>? What exactly is the difference between an
		  <I>argument</I>, a <I>dispute</I>, and a <I>row</I>? In
		  this paper, we describe our research in progress on the
		  problem of <B>lexical choice</B> and the representations of
		  world knowledge and of lexical structure and meaning that
		  the task requires. In particular, we wish to deal with
		  <B>nuances</B> and <B>subtleties</B> of denotation and
		  connotation---shades of meaning and of style---such as
		  those illustrated by the examples above.</p> <P> We are
		  studying the task in two related contexts: machine
		  translation, and the generation of multilingual text from a
		  single representation of content. In the present paper, we
		  concentrate on issues in lexical representation. We
		  describe a methodology, based on dictionary usage notes,
		  that we are using to discover the dimensions along which
		  similar words can be differentiated, and we discuss a
		  two-part representation for lexical differentiation.</p>},
  download	= {http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/DiMarco++-NearSynonyms-93.pdf}
		  
}

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