Extracting Synonyms from Dictionary Definitions
Tong Wang, Graeme Hirst · 2009
We investigate the problem of extracting synonyms from dictionary definitions. Our premise for using def-inition texts in dictionaries is that, in contrast to free-texts, their composition usually exhibits more regular-ities in terms of syntax and style and thus, will pro-vide a better controlled environment for synonym ex-traction. 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 compar-ing extraction results with existing thesauri, and by la-beling synonyms in definition texts. Results show that simple rule-based extraction methods perform surpris-ingly well on solving TOEFL synonym questions; they actually out-perform the best reported lexicon-based method by a large margin, although they do not corre-late as well with existing thesauri.