Syntactic Contexts for Finding Semantically Related Words

Abstract

Finding semantically related words is a first step in the direction of automatic ontology building. Guided by the view that similar words occur in similar contexts, we looked at the syntactic context of words to measure their semantic similarity. Words that occur in a direct object relation with the verb drink, for instance, have something in common (liquidity, ...). Co-occurrence data for common nouns and proper names, for several syntactic relations, was collected from an automatically parsed corpus of 78 million words of newspaper text. We used several vector-based methods to compute the distributional similarity between words. Using Dutch EuroWordNet as evaluation standard, we investigated which vector-based method and which combination of syntactic relations is the strongest predictor of semantic similarity.