informatics Article Improving Semantic Similarity with Cross-Lingual Resources: A Study in Bangla—A Low Resourced Language Rajat Pandit 1,* , Saptarshi Sengupta 2, Sudip Kumar Naskar 3, Niladri Sekhar Dash 4 and Mohini Mohan Sardar 5 1 Department of Computer Science, West Bengal State University, Kolkata 700126, India 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN 55812, USA;
[email protected] 3 Department of Computer Science & Engineering , Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India;
[email protected] 4 Linguistic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata 700108, India;
[email protected] 5 Department of Bengali, West Bengal State University, Kolkata 700126, India;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 17 February 2019; Accepted: 20 April 2019; Published: 5 May 2019 Abstract: Semantic similarity is a long-standing problem in natural language processing (NLP). It is a topic of great interest as its understanding can provide a look into how human beings comprehend meaning and make associations between words. However, when this problem is looked at from the viewpoint of machine understanding, particularly for under resourced languages, it poses a different problem altogether. In this paper, semantic similarity is explored in Bangla, a less resourced language. For ameliorating the situation in such languages, the most rudimentary method (path-based) and the latest state-of-the-art method (Word2Vec) for semantic similarity calculation were augmented using cross-lingual resources in English and the results obtained are truly astonishing. In the presented paper, two semantic similarity approaches have been explored in Bangla, namely the path-based and distributional model and their cross-lingual counterparts were synthesized in light of the English WordNet and Corpora.