Measuring cross-lingual semantic similarity across european languages

This paper studies cross-lingual semantic similarity (CLSS) between five European languages (i.e. English, French, German, Spanish and Italian) via unsupervised word embeddings from a cross-lingual lexicon. The vocabulary in each language is projected onto a separate high-dimensional vector space, and these vector spaces are then compared using several different distance measures (i.e., correlation, cosine etc.) to measure their pairwise semantic similarities between these languages. A substantial degree of similarity is observed between the vector spaces learned from corpora of the European languages. Null hypothesis testing and bootstrap methods (by resampling without replacement) are utilized to verify the results. © 2017 IEEE

Distributional Measures of Semantic Distance: A Survey

The ability to mimic human notions of semantic distance has widespread applications. Some measures rely only on raw text (distributional measures) and some rely on knowledge sources such as WordNet. Although extensive studies have been performed to compare WordNet-based measures with human judgment, the use of distributional measures as proxies to estimate semantic distance has received little attention. Even though they have traditionally performed poorly when compared to WordNet-based measures, they lay claim to certain uniquely attractive features, such as their applicability in resource-poor languages and their ability to mimic both semantic similarity and semantic relatedness. Therefore, this paper presents a detailed study of distributional measures. Particular attention is paid to flesh out the strengths and limitations of both WordNet-based and distributional measures, and how distributional measures of distance can be brought more in line with human notions of semantic distance. We conclude with a brief discussion of recent work on hybrid measures