Abstract
We describe an approach to the automatic extraction of synonyms that is easy to port across domains and across languages. The approach relies on automatic word alignments in parallel texts and uses distributional methods to compute the semantic similarity of words based on these word alignments. As a result the system outputs ranked lists of candidate synonyms for a given word. We apply the method to French, a language for which an extensive electronic synonym dictionary is available, that serves to evaluate the method. We compare the performance with a system that uses syntactic contexts to acquire synonyms automatically. We show that the alignment-based method outperforms the syntactic method by a large margin. In addition, we show that we can adapt to the domain of colloquial language use by replacing the parallel corpus with one that contains a lot of conversational speech: a corpus of movie subtitles. Furthermore, we apply the method to another language, Dutch, with similar performances.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baayen, R., Piepenbrock, R., van Rijn, H.: The CELEX lexical database (CD-ROM). Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1993)
Bannard, C., Callison-Burch, C.: Paraphrasing with bilingual parallel corpora. In: Proceedings of the annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL (2005)
Bourigault, D., Galy, E.: Analyse distributionnelle de corpus de langue générale et synonymie. In: Lorient, Actes des Journées de la Linguistique de Corpus, JLC (2005)
Brown, P.F., Della Pietra, S.A., Della Pietra, V.J., Mercer, R.L.: The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics 19(2), 263–296 (1993)
Callison-Burch, C.: Syntactic constraints on paraphrases extracted from parallel corpora. In: Proceedings of EMNLP (2008)
Church, K.W., Hanks, P.: Word association norms, mutual information and lexicography. In: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association of Computational Linguistics, ACL (1989)
Curran, J.: From distributional to semantic similarity. Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh (2003)
Curran, J.R., Moens, M.: Improvements in automatic thesaurus extraction. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP, pp. 222–229 (2002)
Dagan, I., Itai, A., Schwall, U.: Two languages are more informative than one. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL (1991)
Dyvik, H.: Translations as semantic mirrors. In: Proceedings of Workshop Multilinguality in the Lexicon II (ECAI) (1998)
Harris, Z.S.: Mathematical structures of language. Wiley, Chichester (1968)
Hindle, D.: Noun classification from predicate-argument structures. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, ACL (1990)
Ide, N., Erjavec, T., Tufis, D.: Sense discrimination with parallel corpora. In: Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Sense Disambiguation: Recent Successes and Future Directions (2002)
Koehn, P.: Europarl: A multilingual corpus for evaluation of machine translation (2003)
Lin, D.: Automatic retrieval and clustering of similar words. In: Proceedings of COLING/ACL (1998)
Lin, D., Zhao, S., Qin, L., Zhou, M.: Identifying synonyms among distributionally similar words. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (2003)
Moortgat, M., Schuurman, I., van der Wouden, T.: CGN syntactische annotatie, Internal Project Report Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (2000), http://lands.let.kun.nl/cgn
van Noord, G.: At last parsing is now operational. In: Actes de la 13eme Conference sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (2006)
Och, F.: GIZA++: Training of statistical translation models (2003), http://www.isi.edu/~och/GIZA++.html
Ordelman, R.: Twente nieuws corpus (TwNC). Parlevink Language Techonology Group. University of Twente (2002)
van der Plas, L.: Automatic lexico-semantic acquisition for question answering. Groningen dissertations in linguistics (2008)
van der Plas, L.: Automatic lexico-semantic acquisition for question answering. Ph.D. thesis, University of Groningen (2008)
van der Plas, L., Tiedemann, J.: Finding synonyms using automatic word alignment and measures of distributional similarity. In: Proceedings of COLING/ACL (2006)
van der PLas, L., Tiedemann, J.: Finding medical term variations using parallel corpora and distributional similarity. In: Proceedings of the Coling Workshop on Ontologies and Lexical Resources (2010)
van der Plas, L., Tiedemann, J., Manguin, J.L.: Extraction de synonymes à partir d’un corpus multilingue aligné. Actes des 5èmes Journées de Linguistique de Corpus à Lorient (2008)
Ploux, S., Manguin, J.: Dictionnaire électronique des synonymes français (1998, released 2007)
Resnik, P.: Selection and information, Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania (1993)
Resnik, P., Yarowsky, D.: A perspective on word sense disambiguation methods and their evaluation. In: Proceedings of ACL SIGLEX Workshop on Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How? (1997)
Schmid, H.: Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In: Proceedings of International Conference on New Methods in Language Processing, Manchester, UK, pp. 44–49 (1994), http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~schmid/
Shimota, M., Sumita, E.: Automatic paraphrasing based on parallel corpus for normalization. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC (2002)
Tiedemann, J.: News from OPUS - A collection of multilingual parallel corpora with tools and interfaces. In: Nicolov, N., Bontcheva, K., Angelova, G., Mitkov, R. (eds.) Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, vol. V, pp. 237–248. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2009)
Tiedemann, J., Nygaard, L.: The OPUS corpus - parallel & free. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC (2004)
Vossen, P.: EuroWordNet A Multilingual Database with Lexical Semantic Networks. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1998)
Wu, H., Zhou, M.: Optimizing synonym extraction using monolingual and bilingual resources. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Paraphrasing: Paraphrase Acquisition and Applications, IWP (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
van der Plas, L., Tiedemann, J., Manguin, JL. (2011). Synonym Acquisition across Domains and Languages. In: Pallotta, V., Soro, A., Vargiu, E. (eds) Advances in Distributed Agent-Based Retrieval Tools. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 361. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21384-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21384-7_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21383-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21384-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)