# Distinguishing Antonyms and Synonyms in a Pattern-based Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02962 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02962/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2017.

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Distinguishing between antonyms and synonyms is a key task to achieve high performance in NLP systems. While they are notoriously difficult to distinguish by distributional co-occurrence models, pattern-based methods have proven effective to differentiate between the relations. In this paper, we present a novel neural network model AntSynNET that exploits lexico-syntactic patterns from syntactic parse trees. In addition to the lexical and syntactic information, we successfully integrate the distance between the related words along the syntactic path as a new pattern feature. The results from classification experiments show that AntSynNET improves the performance over prior pattern-based methods.