University of Edinburgh. College of Science and Engineering. School of Informatics.
Abstract
Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsLexical-semantic resources, including thesauri and WORDNET, have been successfully incorporated
into a wide range of applications in Natural Language Processing. However they are
very difficult and expensive to create and maintain, and their usefulness has been severely
hampered by their limited coverage, bias and inconsistency. Automated and semi-automated
methods for developing such resources are therefore crucial for further resource development
and improved application performance.
Systems that extract thesauri often identify similar words using the distributional hypothesis
that similar words appear in similar contexts. This approach involves using corpora to examine
the contexts each word appears in and then calculating the similarity between context distributions.
Different definitions of context can be used, and I begin by examining how different
types of extracted context influence similarity.
To be of most benefit these systems must be capable of finding synonyms for rare words.
Reliable context counts for rare events can only be extracted from vast collections of text. In
this dissertation I describe how to extract contexts from a corpus of over 2 billion words. I
describe techniques for processing text on this scale and examine the trade-off between context
accuracy, information content and quantity of text analysed.
Distributional similarity is at best an approximation to semantic similarity. I develop improved
approximations motivated by the intuition that some events in the context distribution are more
indicative of meaning than others. For instance, the object-of-verb context wear is far more
indicative of a clothing noun than get. However, existing distributional techniques do not
effectively utilise this information. The new context-weighted similarity metric I propose in
this dissertation significantly outperforms every distributional similarity metric described in
the literature.
Nearest-neighbour similarity algorithms scale poorly with vocabulary and context vector size.
To overcome this problem I introduce a new context-weighted approximation algorithm with
bounded complexity in context vector size that significantly reduces the system runtime with
only a minor performance penalty. I also describe a parallelized version of the system that runs
on a Beowulf cluster for the 2 billion word experiments.
To evaluate the context-weighted similarity measure I compare ranked similarity lists against
gold-standard resources using precision and recall-based measures from Information Retrieval,
since the alternative, application-based evaluation, can often be influenced by distributional
as well as semantic similarity. I also perform a detailed analysis of the final results using
WORDNET.
Finally, I apply my similarity metric to the task of assigning words to WORDNET semantic
categories. I demonstrate that this new approach outperforms existing methods and overcomes
some of their weaknesses