Modelling Word Similarity: an Evaluation of Automatic Synonymy Extraction Algorithms.

Kris Heylen, Yves Peirsman, Dirk Geeraerts, Dirk Speelman


Abstract
Vector-based models of lexical semantics retrieve semantically related words automatically from large corpora by exploiting the property that words with a similar meaning tend to occur in similar contexts. Despite their increasing popularity, it is unclear which kind of semantic similarity they actually capture and for which kind of words. In this paper, we use three vector-based models to retrieve semantically related words for a set of Dutch nouns and we analyse whether three linguistic properties of the nouns influence the results. In particular, we compare results from a dependency-based model with those from a 1st and 2nd order bag-of-words model and we examine the effect of the nouns’ frequency, semantic speficity and semantic class. We find that all three models find more synonyms for high-frequency nouns and those belonging to abstract semantic classses. Semantic specificty does not have a clear influence.
Anthology ID:
L08-1204
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/818_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kris Heylen, Yves Peirsman, Dirk Geeraerts, and Dirk Speelman. 2008. Modelling Word Similarity: an Evaluation of Automatic Synonymy Extraction Algorithms.. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Modelling Word Similarity: an Evaluation of Automatic Synonymy Extraction Algorithms. (Heylen et al., LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/818_paper.pdf