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Measuring Semantic Similarity by Latent Relational Analysis

Turney, Peter D. (2005) Measuring Semantic Similarity by Latent Relational Analysis. [Conference Paper]

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Abstract

This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring semantic similarity. LRA measures similarity in the semantic relations between two pairs of words. When two pairs have a high degree of relational similarity, they are analogous. For example, the pair cat:meow is analogous to the pair dog:bark. There is evidence from cognitive science that relational similarity is fundamental to many cognitive and linguistic tasks (e.g., analogical reasoning). In the Vector Space Model (VSM) approach to measuring relational similarity, the similarity between two pairs is calculated by the cosine of the angle between the vectors that represent the two pairs. The elements in the vectors are based on the frequencies of manually constructed patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) patterns are derived automatically from the corpus, (2) Singular Value Decomposition is used to smooth the frequency data, and (3) synonyms are used to reformulate word pairs. This paper describes the LRA algorithm and experimentally compares LRA to VSM on two tasks, answering college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions and classifying semantic relations in noun-modifier expressions. LRA achieves state-of-the-art results, reaching human-level performance on the analogy questions and significantly exceeding VSM performance on both tasks.

Item Type:Conference Paper
Keywords:analogies, semantic relations, vector space model, noun-modifier expressions, latent relational analysis
Subjects:Computer Science > Language
Linguistics > Computational Linguistics
Linguistics > Semantics
Computer Science > Machine Learning
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
ID Code:4501
Deposited By: Turney, Peter
Deposited On:11 Aug 2005
Last Modified:11 Mar 2011 08:56

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