Walk-based Computation of Contextual Word Similarity

摘要

We propose a new measure of semantic similarity between words in context, which exploits the syntactic/semantic structure of the context surrounding each target word. For a given pair of target words and their sentential contexts, labeled directed graphs are made from the output of a semantic parser on these sentences. Nodes in these graphs represent words in the sentences, and labeled edges represent syntactic/semantic relations between them. The similarity between the target words is then computed as the sum of the similarity of walks starting from the target words (nodes) in the two graphs. The proposed measure is tested on word sense disambiguation and paraphrase ranking tasks, and the results are promising: The proposed measure outperforms existing methods which completely ignore or do not fully exploit syntactic/semantic structural co-occurrences between a target word and its neighbors.