Augmenting WordNet-like lexical resources with distributional evidence. An application-oriented perspective
Simonetta Montemagni⋄, Vito Pirrelli · 1998
The paper deals with the issue of how and to what extent WordNet-like resources provide the necessary information for an assessment of semantic similarity which is useful for practical applications. The general point is made that taxonomical information should be complemented with distributional evidence. The claim is substantiated through experimental data and an illustration of a word sense disambiguation system (SENSE) capable of using contextually-relevant semantic similarity. 1. Introduction Assessment * of semantic similarity has proved to be be essential for a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including syntactic disambiguation (either structural or functional), word sense disambiguation, selection of appropriate translation equivalent, assessment of lexical cohesion in texts for automatic summarisation, query expansion and document indexing in Information Retrieval. Typically, the semantic similarity between words is computed on the basis of taxonomical re...