Extracting word synonyms from text using neural approaches

Abstract

Extracting synonyms from textual corpora using computational techniques is an interesting research problem in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain. Neural techniques (such as Word2Vec) have been recently utilized to produce distributional word representations (also known as word embeddings) that capture semantic similarity/relatedness between words based on linear context. Nevertheless, using these techniques for synonyms extraction poses many challenges due to the fact that similarity between vector word representations does not indicate only synonymy between words, but also other sense relations as well as word association or relatedness. In this paper, we tackle this problem using a novel 2-step approach. We first build distributional word embeddings using Word2Vec then use the induced word embeddings as an input to train a feed-forward neutral network using annotated dataset to distinguish between synonyms and other semantically related words.