期刊名称:The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics
印刷版ISSN:0032-6585
电子版ISSN:1804-0462
出版年度:2016
卷号:105
期号:1
页码:111-142
DOI:10.1515/pralin-2016-0006
语种:English
出版社:Walter de Gruyter GmbH
摘要:In this paper we present a novel approach to minimally supervised synonym extraction. The approach is based on the word embeddings and aims at presenting a method for synonym extraction that is extensible to various languages. We report experiments with word vectors trained by using both the continuous bag-of-words model (CBoW) and the skip-gram model (SG) investigating the effects of different settings with respect to the contextual window size, the number of dimensions and the type of word vectors. We analyze the word categories that are (cosine) similar in the vector space, showing that cosine similarity on its own is a bad indicator to determine if two words are synonymous. In this context, we propose a new measure, relative cosine similarity, for calculating similarity relative to other cosine-similar words in the corpus. We show that calculating similarity relative to other words boosts the precision of the extraction. We also experiment with combining similarity scores from differently-trained vectors and explore the advantages of using a part-of-speech tagger as a way of introducing some light supervision, thus aiding extraction. We perform both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation on our final system: intrinsic evaluation is carried out manually by two human evaluators and we use the output of our system in a machine translation task for extrinsic evaluation, showing that the extracted synonyms improve the evaluation metric.