New experiments in distributional representations of synonymy
Dayne Freitag, M. Blume, JOHN J. BYRNES, Edmond Chow, Sadik Kapadia, Richard Rohwer, Zhiqiang Wang · 2005
Recent work on the problem of detecting synonymy through corpus analysis has used the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) as a benchmark. However, this test involves as few as 80 questions, prompting questions regarding the statistical significance of reported results. We overcome this limitation by generating a TOEFL-like test using WordNet, containing thousands of questions and composed only of words occurring with sufficient corpus frequency to support sound distributional comparisons. Experiments with this test lead us to a similarity measure which significantly outperforms the best proposed to date. Analysis suggests that a strength of this measure is its relative robustness against polysemy.