Gram-free synonym extraction via suffix arrays

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for implementing real-time synonym search systems. Our final aim is to provide users with an interface with which they can query the system for any length strings and the system returns a list of synonyms of the input string. We propose an efficient algorithm for this operation. The strategy involves indexing documents by suffix arrays and finding adjacent strings of the query by dynamically retrieving its contexts (i.e., strings around the query). The extracted contexts are in turn sent to the suffix arrays to retrieve the strings around the contexts, which are likely to contain the synonyms of the query string. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.