Automatic acquisition of synonyms of verbs from an explanatory dictionary using hyponym and hyperonym relations

Abstract

In this paper we present an automatic method for extraction of synonyms of verbs from an explanatory dictionary based only on hyponym/hyperonym relations existing between the verbs defined and the genus used in their definitions. The set of pairs verb-genus can be considered as a directed graph, so we applied an algorithm to identify cycles in these kind of structures. We found that some cycles represent chains of synonyms. We obtain high precision and low recall. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.