Acquiring Collocations for Lexical Choice between Near-Synonyms

Abstract

We extend a lexical knowledge-base of near-synonym differences with knowledge about their collocational behaviour. This type of knowledge is useful in the process of lexical choice between near-synonyms. We acquire collocations for the near-synonyms of interest from a corpus (only collocations with the appropriate sense and part-of-speech). For each word that collocates with a near-synonym we use a differential test to learn whether the word forms a less-preferred collocation or an anti-collocation with other near-synonyms in the same cluster. For this task we use a much larger corpus (the Web). We also look at associations (longer-distance co-occurrences) as a possible source of learning more about nuances that the near-synonyms may carry.