How to find words sysnonyms using GATE ANNIE?

Question

I have been working on information extraction and was able to run standAloneAnnie.java http://gate.ac.uk/wiki/code-repository/src/sheffield/examples/StandAloneAnnie.java

My question is, How can I use GATE ANNIE to get similar words like if I input (dine) will get result like (food, eat, dinner, restaurant) ?

More Information:
I am doing a project where I was assigned to develop a simple webpage to take user input and pass to GATE components which will tokenize the query and return a semantic grouping for each phrase in order to make some recommendation.

For example user would enter "I want to have dinner in Kuala Lumpur" and the system will break it down to (Search for :dinner - Required: restaurant, dinner, eat, food - Location: Kuala Lumpur.

ANNIE by default has like 15 annotations, see demo http://services.gate.ac.uk/annie/ Now I already implemented everything as the demo but my question is. Can I do that using GATE ANNIE, i mean is it possible to find words synonyms or group words based on their type (noun, verbs)?

Answer 1

Plain vanilla ANNIE doesn't support this kind of thing but there are third party plugins such as Phil Gooch's WordNet Suggester that might help. Or if your domain is fairly restricted you might get better results with less effort by simply creating your own gazetteer lists of related terms and a few simple JAPE rules. You may find the training materials available on the GATE Wiki useful if you haven't done much of this before.