language: en

Grouping synonyms by definitions

Ingrid Falk *
INRIA / Université Nancy 2
ingrid.falk @loria.fr
Claire Gardent
CNRS / LORIA,
Nancy
claire.gardent@loria.fr
Evelyne Jacquey
CNRS / ATILF,
Nancy
evelyne.jacquey@atilf.fr
Fabienne Venant
Université Nancy 2 / LORIA,
Nancy
fabienne.venant@loria.fr

Abstract We present a method for grouping the synonyms of a lemma according to its dictionary senses. The senses are defined by a large machine readable dictionary for French, the TLFi (Trésor de la langue française informatisé) and the synonyms are given by 5 synonym dictionaries (also for French). To evaluate the proposed method, we manually constructed a gold standard where for each (word, definition) pair and given the set of synonyms defined for that word by the 5 synonym dictionaries, 4 lexicographers specified the set of synonyms they judge adequate. While inter-annotator agreement ranges on that task from 67% to at best 88% depending on the annotator pair and on the synonym dictionary being considered, the automatic procedure we propose scores a precision of 67% and a recall of 71%. The proposed method is compared with related work namely, word sense disambiguation, synonym lexicon acquisition and WordNet construction.

Keywords Similarity measures, Synonyms, Lexical Acquisition

1 Introduction