Find synonym and root of a word in java

Question

I am developing a JAVA application where user enters a word in textbox,the synonyms of the word has to be autoprompted to him.

Given a word,is it possible to find its synonyms and its root in JAVA?should i use a dictionary?

eg:

word:   killer
synonym: murderer butcher hitman

word:   killing
root:   kill

Answer 1

One option would be to use WordNet with a Java API, e.g. JAWS: http://lyle.smu.edu/~tspell/jaws

Answer 2

As for roots this process is called stemming (google for that). There are some (Java) libraries like that: http://snowball.tartarus.org/download.php