A method for grouping synonyms.

Abstract : In this paper we present a method for merging several synonym dictionaries and a general purpose dictionary, thus permitting both an increased synonymic coverage of the general lexicon and the enrichment of the synonym lexicon with part of speech and definitional information that are lacking in the original synonym dictionaries. The method uses gloss based similarity measures, often employed to disambiguate words in context, to map the synonyms of a verb to the definitions associated with that verb in a large machine readable dictionary. The results are evaluated with respect to a hand-built reference. Furthermore, we explore ways towards using this method in combination with translation and ontology enrichment techniques to enrich our synonym lexicon and align it with the Princeton/EuroWordNet.