What implementation and translation teach us: the case of semantic similarity measures in wordnets
Marten Postma, Piek T. J. M. Vossen · 2014
Similarity is an important instrument used for many applications.It has been available for a while as a toolkit for English and it has been frequently tested on English gold standards.In this paper, we describe how we constructed a Dutch gold standard that matches the English gold standard as closely as possible.We also re-implemented the Word-Net::Similarity package to be able to deal with any wordnet that is specified in Wordnet-LMF format independent of the language.This opens up the possibility to compare the similarity measures across wordnets and across languages.It also provides a new way of comparing wordnet structures across languages through one of its core aspects: the synonymy and hyponymy structure.In this paper, we report on the comparison between Dutch and English wordnets and gold standards.This comparison shows that the gold standards, and therefore the intuitions of English and Dutch native speakers, appear to be highly compatible.We also show that our package generates similar results for English as reported earlier and good results for Dutch.To the contrary of what we expected, some measures even perform better in Dutch than English.