A "regex for words" (semantic replacement) - any example syntax and libraries?

Question

I'm looking for syntatic examples or common techniques for doing regular expression style transformations on words instead of characters, given a procedural language.

For example, to trace copying, one would want to create a document with similar meaning but with different word choices.

I'd like to be able to concisely define these possible transformations that I can apply to a text stream.

Eg. "fast noun" to "rapid noun", but "go fast." wouldn't get transformed (no noun afterwards.
Or: "Alice will sing song" to "song will be sung by Alice"

I'd expect this to be done in grammatical checkers, such as detecting passive voice.

A C# implementation for this sort of language-processing would be really neat, but I think the bulk of any effort is coming up with the right rules - Keeping the rules clear and understandable seems like a place to begin.

Answer 1

You could try Jason Rennie > WordNet-QueryData-1.47 > WordNet::QueryData

Answer 2

One good place to start researching would be "Word Net" - it's a dictionary of semantics, grouping words together by similar meaning, and also recording the relationships between words in useful ways.

There are a bunch of software projects leveraging the Word Net corpus, one of them may be what you need.