Synony

Synony is a lexical resource and software platform designed to collect, organize, and provide access to synonyms, near-synonyms, and semantically related terms across languages. The project aims to support language understanding, information retrieval, and language-enabled applications by offering a structured representation of lexical relatedness and usage contexts. Core data model centers on lemma, sense, and relation types such as synonym, near-synonym, hypernym, and related term, each annotated with usage examples, domain tags, and confidence scores.

Data sources include licensed dictionaries, corpora-derived associations, and community contributions, all subject to editorial review. The platform provides an API and downloadable datasets, with supports for JSON-LD and RDF formats to facilitate integration with NLP pipelines and knowledge graphs. Synony also emphasizes multilingual alignment, attempting to map cross-language synonyms and creating interlingual sense correspondences.

Applications span search enhancement, query expansion, text generation, and machine translation refinement. The project is governed by a community board and a licensing framework that allows free academic use and commercial licenses. Critics note potential noise from automated generation and the challenge of maintaining sense disambiguation across languages.

See also: synonyms, thesaurus, lexical databases, WordNet, BabelNet, paraphrase databases.