  We present a method for grouping the synonyms of a lemma according to its
dictionary senses. The senses are defined by a large machine readable
dictionary for French, the TLFi (Tr\'esor de la langue fran\c{c}aise
informatis\'e) and the synonyms are given by 5 synonym dictionaries (also for
French). To evaluate the proposed method, we manually constructed a gold
standard where for each (word, definition) pair and given the set of synonyms
defined for that word by the 5 synonym dictionaries, 4 lexicographers specified
the set of synonyms they judge adequate. While inter-annotator agreement ranges
on that task from 67% to at best 88% depending on the annotator pair and on the
synonym dictionary being considered, the automatic procedure we propose scores
a precision of 67% and a recall of 71%. The proposed method is compared with
related work namely, word sense disambiguation, synonym lexicon acquisition and
WordNet construction.
