SUBJECT: Re : [ &NAME ] &NAME Hello again , I would like to thank every person who took the time to answer my question about synonyms and the use of quantitative methods to analyze them . I received numerous helpful links and materials ( see below for a summary ) . Thank you to &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME and &NAME &NAME . I forgot to translate the &NUM words I am interested in : Italian ' perfino ' and ' persino ' ' even ' ( as a focus particle ) . They are function words and therefore it would ( maybe ? ) be even be more surprising to have &NUM identical forms here . From some preliminary tests , however , they seem very close indeed . What I am wondering about is , if I use quantitative measures , such as the z-score , what would be a sufficient difference between &NUM measures ( the point of delicacy or resolution ) to distinguish synonyms from near-synonyms ? Here is a list of articles and links I was referred to . Some of them are directly downloadable from the &NAME . &NAME &NAME &NAME & &NAME &NAME ( &NUM ) Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing , &ORG Press , &NAME , &NAME , Pp. &NUM . ( Chapter &NUM ) . With an implementation of the idea at : &WEBSITE Church , &NAME &NAME and &NAME &NAME . &NUM . &NAME Association Norms , Mutual Information , and Lexicography . Computational Linguistics &NUM : &NUM . Church , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME and &NAME &NAME . &NUM . Using Statistics in Lexical Analysis . In : &NAME , &NAME ( ed. ) . Lexical Acquisition : Exploiting On-line Resources to Build a Lexicon . &NAME , &NAME : &NAME &NAME , p. &NUM . Church , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME , &NAME &NAME and &NAME &NAME . &NUM . &NAME &NAME . In : &NAME , &NAME &NAME &NAME and &NAME &NAME ( eds. ) . Computational Approaches to the Lexicon . &NAME , &NAME &NAME : &NAME University Press , p. &NUM . &NAME &NAME et &NAME . : ' Identifying Synonyms among &NAME Similar Words ' at : &WEBSITE &NAME &NAME and &NAME &NAME 's work on ' near-synonymy ' ( and also &NAME &NAME ) . More material is available from their &NAME group web page &WEBSITE Gries , &NAME &NAME &NUM . A &NAME analysis of -ic and -ical adjectives . &NAME &NAME &NUM : &NUM . Gries , &NAME &NAME &NUM . Testing the sub-test : A collocational-overlap analysis of English -ic and -ical adjectives . International Journal of Corpus Linguistics &NUM ( &NUM ) : &NUM . ( which will come out in a few weeks or so ) . &NAME &NAME &NUM : &NAME , Racial and &NAME : The Language of Racism ? ( in Texts and Practices , eds. &NAME & &NAME , &NAME , &NAME ) &NAME , &NAME &NUM : &NAME : from silly ass to lexical sets ( in &NAME , &NAME and &NAME , &NAME ( eds ) ' Words in Context : A Tribute to &NAME &NAME on his Retirement ' . &NAME &NUM . &NAME , &NAME ( forthcoming ) : Corpus , &NAME , and Lexical Sets , in Proceedings of &NAME ( Hungarian Society for the Study of English ) Thematic Conference , ' Empirically Based Approaches to Linguistic Description ' , University of &NAME , &NAME ] [ about sad / unhappy ] Many thanks again , &NAME &NAME &NAME On &NAME , &NUM May &NUM , &NAME &NAME &NAME wrote : <QUOTE> Hello ! I am currently working on &NUM Italian words ( ' perfino ' and ' persino ' ) , which I suspect to be absolute synonyms . My goal is to demonstrate their synonymy by using quantitative methods ( I will use the Italian corpus &NAME , not yet pos-tagged ) . I was wondering if anybody could refer me to similar studies or could give me a hint of how to procede . Any suggestion if welcome ! Thank you very much in advance for your time , &NAME &NAME &NAME &EMAIL &NAME Scholar Dept. of Romance Languages and &NAME University of &NAME <END_QUOTE>