A device or computer readable medium for accurately and automatically obtaining general-purpose information regarding the usage difference between a plurality of synonyms and quasi-synonyms, such as the types of words with which the synonyms and quasi-synonyms are often used, is described. The usage information may be obtained by receiving the input of a plurality of words; extracting sentence data including an inputted word from a corpus; analyzing the sentence structure of the sentence data and extracting nouns that are in a grammatical relationship with the inputted word included in the sentence data; extracting the nodes representing the nouns and the nodes representing the semantic category of the noun from a thesaurus and forming a directional graph for each inputted word; comparing a plurality of directional graphs and extracting the difference nodes; and outputting the extracted difference nodes as information relating to the usage difference of the inputted words.
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