Effectiveness of Indirect Dependency for Automatic Synonym Acquisition.pdfVIP

Effectiveness of Indirect Dependency for Automatic Synonym Acquisition Masato HAGIWARA, Yasuhiro OGAWA, and Katsuhiko TOYAMA Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Japan {hagiwara,yasuhiro,toyama}@kl.i.is.nagoya-u.ac.jp Abstract. Since synonyms are important lexical knowledge, various methods have been proposed for automatic synonym acquisition. Whereas most of the methods are based on the distributional hypothesis and utilize contextual clues, little attention has been paid to what kind of contex- tual information is useful for the purpose. As one of the ways to augment contextual information, we propose the use of indirect dependency, i.e. relation between two words related via two contiguous dependency rela- tions. The evaluation has shown that the performance improvement over normal direct dependency is dramatic, yielding comparable results with surrounding words as context, even with smaller co-occurrence data. 1 Introduction Lexical knowledge is one of the most fundamental but important resources for natural language processing. Among various kinds of lexical relations, synonyms are used in a broad range of applications such as query expansion for information retrieval [8] and automatic thesaurus construction [9]. Various methods [7, 10] have been proposed for automatic synonym acqui- sition. They are often based on the distributional hypothesis [6], which states that semantically similar words share similar contexts, and they can be roughly viewed as the combinations of these two steps: context extraction and similarity calculation. The former extracts useful information such as dependency relations of words from corpora. The latter calculates how semantically similar two given words are, based on the co-occurren