This paper summarizes FBK-irst participation at the lexical substitution task of the SEMEVAL competition. We submitted two different systems, both exploiting synonym lists extracted from dictionaries. For each word to be substituted, the systems rank the associated synonym list according to a similarity metric based on Latent Semantic Analysis and to the occurrences in the Web 1T 5-gram corpus,...

This study examines near synonyms and tries to extract the contrasts that dictate their semantic and associated syntactic behaviors. A near synonym pair of Chinese verbs, fangbian and bianli, which mean ‘to be convenient’, is under examination. Corpus data reveal some important but opaque distributional differences between this synonym pair that are hard to be recognized solely by intuition. Th...

We propose a method for automatic synonym extraction in a dictionary. Our method is based on an algorithm that computes similarity measures between vertices in graphs. This algorithm can be thought of as a generalization of Kleinberg’s web search algorithm to structure graphs that are more general than the hub-authority graph used by Kleinberg. We use the 1913 Webster’s Dictionary and apply our...

Synonym identification during source terminology integration into the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a labor-intensive task needed for every new release of the source. The piecewise synonym (PWS) methodology was previously used for the integration of a small source. The goal of this paper is to determine whether the piecewise synonym methodology with two control parameters scales to ...

The genus Glyphidops Enderlein, 1922, the most widespread and speciose of the New World genera of Neriidae (Diptera), is revised herein. Glyphidops (Glyphidops) ruselatus, new species, G. (G.) steyskali, new species and G. (G.) coracinus, new species are described. Of the 16 previously described species, which were last treated by Aczél (1961), the following synonyms are proposed: Chaetomeriste...

Concept mapping is important in natural language processing (NLP) for bioinformatics. The UMLS Metathesaurus provides a rich synonym thesaurus and is a popular resource for concept mapping. Query expansion using synonyms for subterm substitutions is an effective technique to increase recall for UMLS concept mapping. Synonyms used to substitute subterms are called element synonyms. The completen...

We present our ongoing work on creating fuzzy synsets for Swedish using the lexical resources Synlex and SALDO. Synlex is a graded synonym list created by asking members of the public – users of an online Swedish-English dictionary – to judge the degree of synonymy of a random, automatically generated synonym pair candidate. SALDO is a full-scale Swedish lexical-semantic resource with non-class...

The old technique of "abstraction and refinement" makes it possible to understand complex systems by describing them in successive levels of detail. On the other hand the more modern technique of "generalization and specialization" (or Inheritance) facilitates the construction of systems by enabling reuse of specifications. Both techniques enable developers to specify a taxonomic relationship b...

This paper describes a multilingual semantic search assistant (MSSA) that could help users find proper keywords in FAO fulltext-based search engines. The MSSA implements four independent functions each associated with the AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus to assist users in choosing better keywords: a Venn diagram-based Boolean search interface, an animated AGROVOC concept browser, cross-language ...