Spectral Methods for Thesaurus Construction

Abstract

Traditionally, popular synonym acquisition methods are based on the distributional hypothesis, and a metric such as Jaccard coefficients is used to evaluate the similarity between the contexts of words to obtain synonyms for a query. On the other hand, when one tries to compile and clean a thesaurus, one often already has a modest number of synonym relations at hand. Could something be done with a half-built thesaurus alone? We propose the use of spectral methods and discuss their relation to other network-based algorithms in natural language processing (NLP), such as PageRank and Bootstrapping. Since compiling a thesaurus is very laborious, we believe that adding the proposed method to the toolkit of thesaurus constructors would significantly ease the pain in accomplishing this task.