Finding synonyms using automatic word alignment and measures of distributional similarity

Abstract

There have been many proposals to extract semantically related words using measures of distributional similarity, but these typically are not able to distinguish between synonyms and other types of semantically related words such as antonyms, (co)hyponyms and hypernyms. We present a method based on automatic word alignment of parallel corpora consisting of documents translated into multiple languages and compare our method with a monolingual syntax-based method. The approach that uses aligned multilingual data to extract synonyms shows much higher precision and recall scores for the task of synonym extraction than the monolingual syntax-based approach.