Abstract
Distributional similarity has been widely used to capture the semantic relatedness of words in many NLP tasks. However, parameters such as similarity measures must be manually tuned to make distributional similarity work effectively. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach to synonym identification based on supervised learning and distributional features, which correspond to the commonality of individual context types shared by word pairs. This approach also enables the integration with pattern-based features. In our experiment, we have built and compared eight synonym classifiers, and showed a drastic performance increase of over 60% on F-1 measure, compared to the conventional similarity-based classification. Distributional features that we have proposed are better in classifying synonyms than the conventional common features, while the pattern-based features have appeared almost redundant.
