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Semantic Distance in WordNet: A Simplified and Improved Measure of Semantic Relatedness

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dc.contributor.authorScriver, Aaronen
dc.date.accessioned2006-08-22T14:25:17Z
dc.date.available2006-08-22T14:25:17Z
dc.date.issued2006en
dc.date.submitted2006en
dc.description.abstractMeasures of semantic distance have received a great deal of attention recently in the field of computational lexical semantics. Although techniques for approximating the semantic distance of two concepts have existed for several decades, the introduction of the WordNet lexical database and improvements in corpus analysis have enabled significant improvements in semantic distance measures. <br /><br /> In this study we investigate a special kind of semantic distance, called <em>semantic relatedness</em>. Lexical semantic relatedness measures have proved to be useful for a number of applications, such as word sense disambiguation and real-word spelling error correction. Most relatedness measures rely on the observation that the shortest path between nodes in a semantic network provides a representation of the relationship between two concepts. The strength of relatedness is computed in terms of this path. <br /><br /> This dissertation makes several significant contributions to the study of semantic relatedness. We describe a new measure that calculates semantic relatedness as a function of the shortest path in a semantic network. The proposed measure achieves better results than other standard measures and yet is much simpler than previous models. The proposed measure is shown to achieve a correlation of <em>r</em> = 0. 897 with the judgments of human test subjects using a standard benchmark data set, representing the best performance reported in the literature. We also provide a general formal description for a class of semantic distance measures &mdash; namely, those measures that compute semantic distance from the shortest path in a semantic network. Lastly, we suggest a new methodology for developing path-based semantic distance measures that would limit the possibility of unnecessary complexity in future measures.en
dc.formatapplication/pdfen
dc.format.extent546817 bytes
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/1016
dc.language.isoenen
dc.pendingfalseen
dc.publisherUniversity of Waterlooen
dc.rightsCopyright: 2006, Scriver, Aaron. All rights reserved.en
dc.subjectComputer Scienceen
dc.subjectrelatednessen
dc.subjectsimilarityen
dc.subjectdistanceen
dc.subjectlexicalen
dc.subjectsemanticen
dc.subjectcomputationalen
dc.subjectmeasureen
dc.subjectwordneten
dc.titleSemantic Distance in WordNet: A Simplified and Improved Measure of Semantic Relatednessen
dc.typeMaster Thesisen
uws-etd.degreeMaster of Mathematicsen
uws-etd.degree.departmentSchool of Computer Scienceen
uws.peerReviewStatusUnrevieweden
uws.scholarLevelGraduateen
uws.typeOfResourceTexten

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