Lexical Similarity Based On Quantity Of Information Exchanged - Synonym Extraction

There are a lot of approaches for measuring semantic similarities between words. This paper proposes a new method based on the analysis of a monolingual dictionary. We can view the word definitions of a dictionary as a network: its nodes are the headwords found in the dictionary and its edges represent the relations between a headword and the words present in its definition. In this view, the meaning of a word is defined by the total quantity of information, in which each element of its definition contributes. The similarity between two words is defined by the maximal quantity of information exchanged between them through the network. In order to assess the performance, our measure of similarity will be compared with others measures and some applications using this measure will also be described.