Two methods for Thesaurus Construction

Co-occurrence-based Thesaurus

The general idea underlying the use of term co-occurrence data for thesaurus construction is that words that tend to occur together in documents are likely to have similar, or related, meanings.Co-occurrence data thus provides a statistical method for automatically identifying semantic rela-tionships that are normally contained in a hand-made thesaurus.

Predicate-Argument-based Thesaurus

This method attempts to construct a thesaurus according to predicate-argument structures. The use of this method for thesaurus construction is based on the idea that there are restrictions on what words can appear in certain environments, and in particular, what words can be arguments of a certain predicate .For example, a cat may walk, bite, but can not fly. Each noun may therefore be characterized according to the verbs or adjectives that it occurs with. Nouns may then be grouped according to the extent to which they appear in similar constructions.

Reference:

Ad Hoc Retrieval Experiments Using WordNet and Automatically Constructed Thesauri.