Computer Aided Research on Synonymy and Antonymy

This research is a continuation of that reported in Axiomatic Characterization of Synonymy and Antonymy, which was presented at the 1967 International Conference on Computational Linguistics [3]. In that paper on mathematical linguistics the relations of synonymy and antonymy were regarded as ternary relations and their domains and ranges were discussed. Synonymy and antonymy were defined jointly and implicity by a system of eight axioms, which permitted the proofs of several intuitively satisfying theorems. The present paper on computational linguistics is a preliminary report which describes some computer programs that have been used to investigate the extent to which those axioms model an existing dictionary of synonyms and antonyms [9]. A set of computer programs is discussed that (i) input the dictionary data concerning synonyms and antonyms, (2) create a data structure in core memory to permit the manipulation of data, (3) query this data structure about words and relations, and (4) output the answers to queries or the entire data structure, if desired. Some examples of computer output are also given to indicate present directions of the computer-aided research. *This research was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-67-A-0239-0004.