Using Grammatical Relations to Automate Thesaurus Construction

In this paper we introduce a novel method of automating thesauri using syntactically constrained distributional similarity. With respect to syntactically conditioned co-occurrences, most popular approaches to automatic thesaurus construction simply ignore the salience of grammatical relations and effectively merge them into one united ‘context’. We distinguish semantic differences of each syntactic dependency and propose to generate thesauri through word overlapping across major types of grammatical relations. The encouraging results show that our proposal can build automatic thesauri with significantly higher precision than the traditional methods.