If the words are really similar in meaning, you should still be able to arrive at a useful result using some graph manipulations.
The words might not appear in a directly shared context, but given their semantic similarity, they should share more contexts of distance 1 (or something along those lines) than an arbitrary pair of words.
The words might not appear in a directly shared context, but given their semantic similarity, they should share more contexts of distance 1 (or something along those lines) than an arbitrary pair of words.