THE DIFFERENTIATION OF NEAR-SYNONYMS

The semantic and stylistic differentiation of synonyms and near-synonyms

If we want to describe the action of someone who is looking out a window for an extended time, how do we choose between the words gazing, staring, and peering? What exactly is the difference between an argument, a dispute, and a row? In this paper, we describe our research in progress on the problem of lexical choice and the representations of world knowledge and of lexical structure and meanin...

The Semantic and Stylistic Diierentiation of Synonyms and Near-synonyms

Exploring Approaches to Discriminating among Near-Synonyms

Near-synonyms are words that mean approximately the same thing, and which tend to be assigned to the same leaf in ontologies such as WordNet. However, they can differ from each other subtly in both meaning and usage—consider the pair of nearsynonyms frugal and stingy—and therefore choosing the appropriate near-synonym for a given context is not a trivial problem. Initial work by Edmonds (1997) ...

What Can Near Synonyms Tell Us

This study examines near synonyms and tries to extract the contrasts that dictate their semantic and associated syntactic behaviors. A near synonym pair of Chinese verbs, fangbian and bianli, which mean ‘to be convenient’, is under examination. Corpus data reveal some important but opaque distributional differences between this synonym pair that are hard to be recognized solely by intuition. Th...

Translating near-synonyms: Possibilities and preferences in the interlingua

This paper argues that an interlingual representation must explicitly represent some parts of the meaning of a situation as possibilities (or preferences), not as necessary or definite components of meaning (or constraints). Possibilities enable the analysis and generation of nuance, something required for faithful translation. Furthermore, the representation of the meaning of words is crucial,...