Beyond the Synset: Synonyms in Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources

We present a comparative analysis of synonyms in collaboratively constructed and linguistic lexical semantic resources and its implications for NLP research. Our focus is on the Wiki-based resources constructed mostly by non-experts on the Web which lack any principled linguistic guidelines and rely on user collaboration for quality management, as opposed to conventional sources of synonyms such as WordNet or thesauri. The most prominent examples are Wikipedia (a free Encyclopedia) and its dictionary spin-offs Wiktionary and OmegaWiki , where the latter has a strong focus on crosslinguality. We examine three major ways how synonyms emerge in these resources, all of which imply a different operational definition of synonymy. We then discuss how these synonyms can be mined and used building upon previous research in this field.