Hence, the current study aims at taking an existing Chinese thesaurus, namely the Tongyici Cilin 同義詞詞林, as leverage and extending it with lexical items specific to individual Chinese speech communities.
the feasibility depends on the following issues: (1) Can lexical items from various Chinese speech communities, that is, from such heterogeneous sources, be classified as effectively with methods shown to work for clustering closely related words from presumably the same, or homogenous, source?