Refining Criteria of Paronymy for Building Computer Dictionaries of Russian Paronyms
Elena I. Bolshakova, A. D. Telegina · Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies · 2022
Paronyms are words that have some similarity in sounding and spelling, but differ in meaning and usage (e.g., sensitive -sensible, излишек -излишество).In morphologically rich languages like Russian, paronymy is rather frequent phenomenon and one of the sources of speech difficulties.However, known dictionaries of Russian paronyms are not complete enough to help language learning or to support automatic correction of paronymy errors, and they do not provide precise definition of paronymy, which is necessary for constructing more extensive computer dictionaries.Aiming to clarify the concept of paronymy and to refine the previously proposed formal affix criterion of paronymy, we have performed a statistical study of paronyms taken from two printed dictionaries of Russian paronyms.Formal and semantic similarity of paronymy pairs were numerically estimated across various dimensions: proximity in affixes, in sounding, and in word meanings (the latter with the aid of neural models of distributive semantics and with an extensive base of Russian word combinations).Based on results of the study, refined criteria of paronymy and thresholds were proposed, which can be useful to automatically construct computer dictionaries of Russian paronyms, as well to replenish them by diagnostic contexts.