An approach to classify synonyms in a dictionary of verbs

Several works in computational linguistics try to study the relationships among dictionary entries. These works consider the dictionary as a graph where words are represented by vertices and relationships between two words by an arrow between the corresponding vertices. Several kinds of relationships exist between two words such as synonymy, antonymy, hyperonymy, hyponymy ... We define the proximity of meaning between two words as the power of synonymy between them. In order to characterize this proximity, we focus our study on path length, circuits, and connected components in the dictionary graph. However, this study encounters frequently the polysemy problem that puts together different word acceptations. The aim of this paper is to solve this problem and proposes an algorithm to measure this proximity.