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Defining Verbal Synonyms: between Syntax and Semantics

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2018

Abstract

While studying verbal synonymy, we have investigated the relation between syntax and semantics in hope that the exploration of this relationship will help us to get more insight into the question of synonymy as the relationship relating (similar) meanings between different lexemes. Most synonym lexicons (Wordnets and similar thesauri) are based on an intuition about the similarity of word meanings, or on notions like "semantic roles." In some cases, syntax is also taken into account, but we have found no annotation and/or evaluation experiment to see how strongly can syntax contribute to synonym specification.

We have prepared an annotation experiment for which we have used two treebanks (Czech and English) from the Universal Dependencies (UD) set of parallel corpora (PUDs) in order to see how strong correlation exists between syntax and the assignment of verbs in context to pre-determined (bilingual) classes of synonyms. The resulting statistics confirmed that while syntax does support decisions abou