Uncovering Distributional Differences between Synonyms and Antonyms in a Word Space Model
Silke Scheible, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Sylvia Springorum · 2013
For many NLP applications such as In-formation Extraction and Sentiment De-tection, it is of vital importance to distin-guish between synonyms and antonyms. While the general assumption is that dis-tributional models are not suitable for this task, we demonstrate that using suitable features, differences in the contexts of syn-onymous and antonymous German adjec-tive pairs can be identified with a simple word space model. Experimenting with two context settings (a simple window-based model and a ‘co-disambiguation model ’ to approximate adjective sense disambiguation), our best model signif-icantly outperforms the 50 % baseline and achieves 70.6 % accuracy in a syn-onym/antonym classification task. 1