Abstract

A method of generating synonyms for a stimulus word using a computer is proposed. Vector Space Model, where words in text data are arranged in a multi-dimensional space and degree of similarity between two words of them is calculated from how close the words are in the space, may be available to the method. However, it is not easy to optimize parameters in the method because there is no appropriate standard synonym database where proper synonyms for a stimulus word are thoroughly collected. Therefore, we first built such a standard database employing two steps of human subjects expriments, and optimized the parameters of the method of generating synonyms. As the result, it was found that the Vector Space Model-based method using an electronic dictionary as source is better to generate synonyms than the one using a text corpus and an ordinal method using a thesaurus.