Les Nyms

This article presents the first results of a research project to develop an automated system for identifying thesaural items in electronic text (the ACRONYM Project). The main objective is the identification and use of nyms (words or groups of words occurring in similar collocational environments and, as such, deemed to share meaning reference). The thesaurus, readily updatable, is a representation of textual reality by virtue of being automatically extracted from the text itself.