What substitutes tell us - Analysis of an "all-words" lexical substitution corpus

Abstract

We present the first large-scale English "all-words lexical substitution" corpus. The size of the corpus provides a rich resource for investigations into word meaning. We investigate the nature of lexical substitute sets, comparing them to WordNet synsets. We find them to be consistent with, but more fine-grained than, synsets. We also identify significant differences to results for paraphrase ranking in context reported for the SEMEVAL lexical substitution data. This highlights the influence of corpus construction approaches on evaluation results. © 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics.