Back when I was writing my PhD thesis (in English, as a non-native English speaker) I remember looking for a more efficient way to find synonyms for certain word.

Usually when you are looking for synonyms, you know you already know the word but you just cannot find it. So the Idea I had was to make some kind of "graph" representation of Word relationships given their meaning.

I remember finding a huge list of words with scores related to their meaning like:

Fly 1, Soar 0.9, Float 0.8.

Think, Ponder 0.9, Muse 0.8.

Which really helped, however given the different "directions" of the meaning that a word can have, this is better represented as a graph.

I finished my PhD writing with the use of said list (saddly I could never find it again), and the graph meaning idea just "went away" (lacking a better word) as I finished my degree. But the need for an efficient and quickly way to find that replacement word is still active.