Graph separability and word grouping

• Authors: A. R. Meetham
• Venue: ACM '66 Proceedings of the 1966 21st national conference
• Year: 1966

A semantic group of words is one whose words are associated in meaning, in some way definable by the lexicographer. A thesaurus is a large collection of words, each of which is assigned to one or more semantic groups. The importance of thesauri for applications in library information storage and retrieval is evident from the number of centres interested in them. (No less than 24 centres are listed in the index of Current Research in Scientific Documentation No. 13, and thesuri in 10 disciplines are mentioned specifically.) The present paper describes aspects of an attempt to generate groups of words by purely mechanical means, which seem to have strong semantic connections within groups and which, therefore, are of potential value as thesauri. The lexicographer plays no part at all, and therefore no semantic processes can be used. However, the machine can make very many more binary decisions than a lexicographer, and there is the possibility that a machine generated “thesaurus” is at least as valuable for document processing as a man-made one.