Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 37 (2010) 1-39 Submitted 07/09; published 01/10 Text Relatedness Based on a Word Thesaurus George Tsatsaronis
[email protected] Department of Computer and Information Science Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Iraklis Varlamis
[email protected] Department of Informatics and Telematics Harokopio University, Greece Michalis Vazirgiannis
[email protected] Department of Informatics Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece Abstract The computation of relatedness between two fragments of text in an automated manner requires taking into account a wide range of factors pertaining to the meaning the two fragments convey, and the pairwise relations between their words. Without doubt, a measure of relatedness between text segments must take into account both the lexical and the semantic relatedness between words. Such a measure that captures well both aspects of text relatedness may help in many tasks, such as text retrieval, classification and clustering. In this paper we present a new approach for measuring the semantic relatedness between words based on their implicit semantic links. The approach ex- ploits only a word thesaurus in order to devise implicit semantic links between words. Based on this approach, we introduce Omiotis, a new measure of semantic relatedness between texts which capitalizes on the word-to-word semantic relatedness measure (SR) and extends it to measure the relatedness between texts. We gradually validate our method: we first evaluate the performance of the semantic relatedness measure between individual words, covering word-to-word similar- ity and relatedness, synonym identification and word analogy; then, we proceed with evaluating the performance of our method in measuring text-to-text semantic relatedness in two tasks, namely sentence-to-sentence similarity and paraphrase recognition.