A model of word similarity based on structural alignment of subject-verb-object triples

  • Authors:
  • Dervla O'Keeffe;Fintan Costello

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • CICLing'13 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a new model of word semantics and similarity that is based on the structural alignment of 〈SubjectVerbObject〉 triples extracted from a corpus. The model gives transparent and meaningful representations of word semantics in terms of the predicates asserted of those words in a corpus. The model goes beyond current corpus-based approaches to word similarity in that it reflects the current psychological understanding of similarity as based on structural comparison and alignment. In an assessment comparing the model's similarity scores with those provided by people for 350 word pairs, the model closely matches people's similarity judgments and gives a significantly better fit to people's judgments than that provided by a standard measure of semantic similarity.