Abstract: A device or computer readable medium for accurately and automatically obtaining general-purpose information regarding the usage difference between a plurality of synonyms and quasi-synonyms, such as the types of words with which the synonyms and quasi-synonyms are often used, is described. The usage information may be obtained by receiving the input of a plurality of words; extracting sentence data including an inputted word from a corpus; analyzing the sentence structure of the sentence data and extracting nouns that are in a grammatical relationship with the inputted word included in the sentence data; extracting the nodes representing the nouns and the nodes representing the semantic category of the noun from a thesaurus and forming a directional graph for each inputted word; comparing a plurality of directional graphs and extracting the difference nodes; and outputting the extracted difference nodes as information relating to the usage difference of the inputted words.

Abstract: A device or computer implemented program for accurately and automatically obtaining general-purpose information regarding the usage difference between a plurality of synonyms and quasi-synonyms, such as the types of words with which the synonyms and quasi-synonyms are often used, is provided with: means for receiving the input of a plurality of words; means for extracting sentence data including an inputted word from a corpus; means for analyzing the sentence structure of the sentence data and extracting nouns that are in a grammatical relationship with the inputted word included in the sentence data; means for extracting the nodes representing the nouns and the nodes representing the semantic category of the noun from a thesaurus and forming a directional graph for each inputted word; means for comparing a plurality of directional graphs and extracting the difference nodes; and means for outputting the extracted difference nodes as information relating to the usage difference of the inputted words.