Comparative study of near synonyms is one of the most productive research
paradigms in Chinese lexicography. Empirical studies to discriminate near
synonyms are either introspection-based or corpus-based. Yet, due to the large
quantity of data in a corpus, lexicological studies of Chinese rarely make full
use of the corpus data. To solve this problem, Kilgarriff’s Word Sketch Engine is
designed to automatically obtain grammatical and collocational relations of target words
from corpora for researchers to further analyze them. Chinese Word Sketch (CWS), a
language specific version of Word Sketch Engine, provides a tool to automatically
identify grammatical information for Gigaword size corpora. Through a comparative
study of the synonymous emotion words 愉快 yúkuài 'pleasant' and 高興 gāoxìng
'happy', this paper illustrates how CWS can distinguish them and help lexicographers to
discriminate their subtle differences. In particular, it focuses on the context where these
synonymous words can be used to define each other and context where they
should be differentiated. It also discusses how to select information from CWS
such that the information represented would be suitable for lexicographic
studies. Through the study of near synonyms, we propose that Word Sketch
Lexicography will lead the next generation of dictionaries.

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• Word sketch lexicography: new perspectives on lexicographic studies of Chinese near synonyms