Computational Semantic Detection of Information Overlap in Text
Julia M. Taylor · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2010
This paper is an attempt to investigate whether a computer is capable of finding similar information in structurally different texts, as people do it, without relying on lexical matching and without guessing the meaning of sentences based on word cooccurrence.Considered texts describe the same event, but each text may focus on different parts of the event.The considered texts are not paraphrases, but rather humanproduced descriptions of a simple picture.The goal is not to find similar words in texts, which can be easily done, but to meaningfully connect the overlapping concepts and relationships used in the text descriptions.The meaningbased approach does not use any statistical/machine-learning techniques.The performance of a machine in finding similarity is compared to human performance not just in numbers but in the found information.The results show that the machine matches four out of the five human findings.