@mastersthesis{Wang-MSc,
  author = "Tong Wang",
  title = "Extracting Synonyms from Dictionary Definitions",
  school = "Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto",
  year = "2009",
  abstract = "<p>Automatic extraction of synonyms and/or semantically related 
              words has various applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
              There are currently two mainstream extraction paradigms, namely,
              lexicon-based and distributional approaches. The former usually suffers 
              from low coverage, while the latter is only able to capture general
              relatedness rather than strict synonymy.</p>
              <p>
              In this paper, two rule-based extraction methods are applied to
              denitions from a machine-readable dictionary. Extracted synonyms
              are evaluated in two experiments by solving TOEFL synonym questions
              and being compared against existing thesauri. The proposed approaches
              have achieved satisfactory results in both evaluations, comparable
              to published studies or even the state of the art.
              </p>",
  download = "http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Wang-MSc-paper.pdf"
}