Extracting Synonyms from Dictionary Definitions. Wang, T. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 2009.
abstract   bibtex   

Automatic extraction of synonyms and/or semantically related words has various applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). There are currently two mainstream extraction paradigms, namely, lexicon-based and distributional approaches. The former usually suffers from low coverage, while the latter is only able to capture general relatedness rather than strict synonymy.

In this paper, two rule-based extraction methods are applied to denitions from a machine-readable dictionary. Extracted synonyms are evaluated in two experiments by solving TOEFL synonym questions and being compared against existing thesauri. The proposed approaches have achieved satisfactory results in both evaluations, comparable to published studies or even the state of the art.

@MastersThesis{	  wang-msc,
  author	= {Tong Wang},
  title		= {Extracting Synonyms from Dictionary Definitions},
  school	= {Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto},
  year		= {2009},
  abstract	= {<p>Automatic extraction of synonyms and/or semantically
		  related words has various applications in Natural Language
		  Processing (NLP). There are currently two mainstream
		  extraction paradigms, namely, lexicon-based and
		  distributional approaches. The former usually suffers from
		  low coverage, while the latter is only able to capture
		  general relatedness rather than strict synonymy.</p> <p> In
		  this paper, two rule-based extraction methods are applied
		  to denitions from a machine-readable dictionary. Extracted
		  synonyms are evaluated in two experiments by solving TOEFL
		  synonym questions and being compared against existing
		  thesauri. The proposed approaches have achieved
		  satisfactory results in both evaluations, comparable to
		  published studies or even the state of the art. </p>},
  download	= {http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Wang-MSc-paper.pdf}
}

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