What's the best way to generate similar words?

Question

Hi all I'm fairly up to date with all the NLP tasks out there (nlpprogress.com, paperswithcode.com) and great tools like (nltk, flair, huggingface etc). I want to take a single word, and predict a similar word, a little like the old "Google Sets" feature except extrapolating from a single example. I'm thinking GPT-3 might be the best bet with some seed text like

here is a list of similar things: banana, 

and ask it to predict the next word.

transformer.huggingface.co is promising enough (though hilariously inadequate in itself) that I'm thinking GPT-3 indeed may well be the answer.

But the alternative is to navigate a treebank, through "type of" relationships… much, much faster and cheaper.

I've tagged this "semantic similarity" but really I don't want the relationship to be "similar", rather "is part of same set of".

thoughts most appreciated from actual practitioners in this space rather than hobbyists like me :)

Answer 1

But the alternative is to navigate a treebank, through "type of" relationships… much, much faster and cheaper.

WordNet provides exactly this: it is a lexical database in which words are grouped by synonyms, with several types of relations between groups in particular hypernyms/hyponyms (more general/more specific).

The database can be downloaded and there is a library to use it through nltk.