Spectral Methods for Thesaurus Construction

Traditionally, popular synonym acquisition methods are based on the distributional hypothesis, and a metric such as Jaccard coefficients is used to evaluate the similarity between the contexts of words to obtain synonyms for a query. On the other hand, when one tries to compile and clean a thesaurus, one often already has a modest number of synonym relations at hand. Could something be done with a half built thesaurus alone? We propose the use of spectral methods and discuss their relation to other network-based algorithms in natural language processing (NLP), such as PageRank and Bootstrapping. Since compiling a thesaurus is very laborious, we believe that adding the proposed method to the toolkit of thesaurus constructors would significantly ease the pain in accomplishing the task. Keywords synonym acquisition, synonym extraction, thesaurus, spectral clustering, graph Laplacian

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IEICET
• Authors: Nobuyuki Shimizu, Masashi Sugiyama, Hiroshi Nakagawa
• Keywords: Half Built Thesaurus, IEICET 2010, Popular Synonym Acquisition, Thesaurus