Two types of similarities between words have been studied in the natural language processing community: synonymy and relational similarity. A high degree of similarity exist between synonymous words. On the other hand, a high degree of relational similarity exists between analogous word pairs. We present and empirically test a hypothesis that links these two types of similarities. Specifically, we propose a method to measure the degree of synonymy between two words using relational similarity between word pairs as a proxy. Given two words, first, we represent the semantic relations that hold between those words using lexical patterns. We use a sequential pattern clustering algorithm to identify different lexical patterns that represent the same semantic relation. Second, we compute the degree of synonymy between two words using an inter-cluster covariance matrix. We compare the proposed method for measuring the degree of synonymy against previously proposed methods on the Miller-Charles dataset and the WordSimilarity-353 dataset. Our proposed method outperforms all existing Web-based similarity measures, achieving a statistically significant Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.867 on the Miller-Charles dataset.

An embodied interactive agent has a virtual body that is generally drawn by CG animation. We intuitively assume that the agent's body primarily expresses non-verbal messages, or symbolizes its social characteristics through its appearance. However, we have not objectively elucidated the expressive competence of an agent's body beyond the conclusions of our empirical and subjective intuition. Therefore, it is necessary to explore scientifically how users regard the functional competence of an agent's embodiment. Do users attribute the intelligence of an agent to its virtual body? We investigated how users physically interact with an agent which is merely a virtual entity drawn on the display by CG, through "showing" something to the eyes of the agent, "listening" to something from the mouth of the agent, and "speaking" something into the ears of the agent. However, such interaction does not necessarily attribute the intellectual processing function to the agent, and this issue is explored through two psychological experiments.