Synonym extraction using a semantic distance on a dictionary

Abstract

Synonyms extraction is a difficult task to achieve and evaluate. Some studies have tried to exploit general dictionaries for that purpose, seeing them as graphs where words are related by the definition they appear in, in a complex network of an arguably semantic nature. The advantage of using a general dictionary lies in the coverage, and the availability of such resources, in general and also in specialised domains. We present here a method exploiting such a graph structure to compute a distance between words. This distance is used to isolate candidate synonyms for a given word. We present an evaluation of the relevance of the candidates on a sample of the lexicon.