Extracting synonyms from dictionary definitions

Extracting synonyms from dictionary definitions. Wang, T. & Hirst, G. In Proceedings, Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP) 2009, Borovets, Bulgaria, September, 2009.
abstract bibtex

We investigate the problem of extracting synonyms from dictionary definitions. Our premise for using definition texts in dictionaries is that, in contrast to free-texts, their composition usually exhibits more regularities in terms of syntax and style and thus, will provide a better controlled environment for synonym extraction. We propose three extraction methods: two rule-based ones and one using the maximum entropy model; each method is evaluated on three experiments — by solving TOEFL synonym questions, by comparing extraction results with existing thesauri, and by labeling synonyms in definition texts. Results show that simple rule-based extraction methods perform surprisingly well on solving TOEFL synonym questions; they actually out-perform the best reported lexicon-based method by a large margin, although they do not correlate as well with existing thesauri.

@InProceedings{	  wang2009es,
  author	= {Tong Wang and Graeme Hirst},
  title		= {Extracting synonyms from dictionary definitions},
  year		= {2009},
  booktitle	= {Proceedings, Recent Advances in Natural Language
		  Processing (RANLP) 2009},
  month		= {September},
  address	= {Borovets, Bulgaria},
  abstract	= {We investigate the problem of extracting synonyms from
		  dictionary definitions. Our premise for using definition
		  texts in dictionaries is that, in contrast to free-texts,
		  their composition usually exhibits more regularities in
		  terms of syntax and style and thus, will provide a better
		  controlled environment for synonym extraction. We propose
		  three extraction methods: two rule-based ones and one using
		  the maximum entropy model; each method is evaluated on
		  three experiments --- by solving TOEFL synonym questions,
		  by comparing extraction results with existing thesauri, and
		  by labeling synonyms in definition texts. Results show that
		  simple rule-based extraction methods perform surprisingly
		  well on solving TOEFL synonym questions; they actually
		  out-perform the best reported lexicon-based method by a
		  large margin, although they do not correlate as well with
		  existing thesauri.},
  download	= {http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Wang+Hirst-RANLP-2009.pdf}
		  
}

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