A Method for Computing Lexical Semantic Distance Using Linear Functionals

Abstract

This paper presents a novel, knowledge-based method for measuring semantic similarity in support of applications aimed at organizing and retrieving relevant textual information. We show how a quantitative context may be established for what is essentially qualitative in nature by effecting a topological transformation of the lexicon into a metric space where distance is well-defined. We illustrate the technique with a simple example and report on promising experimental results with a significant word similarity problem.

Keywords: Semantic distance, Knowledge-based semantics, Topological embedding