Automatic Sense Disambiguation of the Near-Synonyms in a Dictionary Entry

We present an automatic method to disambiguate the senses of the near-synonyms in the entries of a dictionary of synonyms. We combine different indicators that take advantage of the structure on the entries and of lexical knowledge in WordNet. We also present the results of human judges doing the disambiguation for 50 randomly selected entries. This small amount of annotated data is used to tune and evaluate our system. 1 Near-Synonyms Near-synonyms are words with close senses. They are described in dictionaries such as Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms (Gove 1984) and Choose the Right Word (Hayakawa 1994) (hereafter CTRW). An entry in these dictionaries presents a cluster of near-synonyms, explains the core meaning that they share, and makes explicit the differences between them. The differences include stylistic, attitudinal, and denotational nuances (see Edmonds 2000, Hirst 1995 for more details). An example of a fragment

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CICLING
• Authors: Diana Zaiu Inkpen, Graeme Hirst
• Keywords: Automatic Method, CICLING 2003, Close Senses, Knowledge In Wordnet, Natural Language Processing