In this study, we focus on automatic synonym detection, specifically targeting the senses of two input Japanese words such as the sense of word “うまい”, which means “good” or “excellent”, and the sense of word “じょうず”, which means “skillful in doing something”. The lexical knowledge obtained from the thesaurus aids in the development of natural language processing techniques. Previous studies on the
... [Show full abstract] acquisition of lexical knowledge in Japanese has focused on the detection of relations between words, such as synonyms, hypernyms, and antonyms. However, these studies primarily focused on detecting synonymy for words, not on the senses of words. To address this problem, we propose a synonym detection method for two Japanese words. This method uses the sentence-BERT similarity and sense definitions extracted from the Japanese dictionary . To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments to detect synonyms using an evaluation dataset from the Iwanami Japanese Dictionary and the Japanese thesaurus “Bunrui-Goi-Hyo”. The experimental results indicated that the proposed method effectively determines synonyms for word senses.