@inproceedings{Wang2009es,
author = "Tong Wang and Graeme Hirst",
title = "Extracting synonyms from dictionary definitions",
year = "2009",
booktitle = "Proceedings, Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
(RANLP) 2009",
month = "September",
address = "Borovets, Bulgaria",
abstract = "We investigate the problem of extracting synonyms from
dictionary
definitions. Our premise for using definition texts in dictionaries is
that, in contrast to free-texts, their composition usually exhibits
more regularities in terms of syntax and style and thus, will provide
a better controlled environment for synonym extraction. We propose
three extraction methods: two rule-based ones and one using the
maximum entropy model; each method is evaluated on three experiments
--- by solving TOEFL synonym questions, by comparing extraction
results with existing thesauri, and by labeling synonyms in definition
texts. Results show that simple rule-based extraction methods perform
surprisingly well on solving TOEFL synonym questions; they actually
out-perform the best reported lexicon-based method by a large margin,
although they do not correlate as well with existing thesauri.",
 download = "http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Wang+Hirst-RANLP-2009.pdf"
}