Using context-window overlapping in synonym discovery and ontology extension

This paper describes a new, unsupervised procedure called Context-window overlapping for calculating the semantic distance between two terms. It is based on the distributional semantics hypothesis, and, in particular, in the fact that synonym words should be interchangeable in every context, and hyponyms can be substituted by their hyperonyms in most contexts. The procedure has been applied to synonym identification, and to ontology extension. In the first task, it has been evaluated with 80 synonym test questions from the TOEFL which already constitute a standard test set in this problem, and attains results similar to most other non-ensemble procedures. Interestingly, it clearly outperforms Latent Semantic Analysis, other procedure grounded on the Distributional Semantic hypothesis. Concerning ontology enrichment, the results obtained are promising, although they can still be much improved. Conclusions are drawn from this result, and we outline several possibilities for future work.

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