Feasibility of Enriching a Chinese Synonym Dictionary with a Synchronous Chinese Corpus

This paper reports on a first step toward the construction of a Pan-Chinese lexical resource. We investigated the plausibility of extending and enhancing an existing Chinese synonym dictionary, the Tongyici Cilin, with lexical items from the financial news domain obtained from a synchronous Chinese corpus, LIVAC. Results showed that 23-40% of the words from various subcorpora are unique to the individual communities, and as much as 70% of such unique items are not yet covered in Cilin. Our next step would be to explore automatic means for extracting related lexical items from the corpus, and to incorporate them into existing semantic classifications.