A Benchmark and Scoring Algorithm for Enriching Arabic Synonyms

Abstract: This paper addresses the task of extending a given synset with additional synonyms taking into account synonymy strength as a fuzzy value. Given a mono/multilingual synset and a threshold (a fuzzy value [0-1]), our goal is to extract new synonyms above this threshold from existing lexicons. We present twofold contributions: an algorithm and a benchmark dataset. The dataset consists of 3K candidate synonyms for 500 synsets. Each candidate synonym is annotated with a fuzzy value by four linguists. The dataset is important for (i) understanding how much linguists (dis/)agree on synonymy, in addition to (ii) using the dataset as a baseline to evaluate our algorithm. Our proposed algorithm extracts synonyms from existing lexicons and computes a fuzzy value for each candidate. Our evaluations show that the algorithm behaves like a linguist and its fuzzy values are close to those proposed by linguists (using RMSE and MAE). The dataset and a demo page are publicly available at https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/synonyms.