Adapting a synonym database to specific domains

This paper describes a method for adapting a general purpose synonym database, like WordNet, to a specific domain, where only a subset of the synonymy relations defined in the general database hold. The method adopts an eliminative approach, based on incrementally pruning the original database. The method is based on a preliminary manual pruning phase and an algorithm for automatically pruning the database. This method has been implemented and used for an Information Retrieval system in the aviation domain.