Word Semantic Similarity for Morphologically Rich Languages

Kalliopi Zervanou, Elias Iosif, Alexandros Potamianos


Abstract
In this work, we investigate the role of morphology on the performance of semantic similarity for morphologically rich languages, such as German and Greek. The challenge in processing languages with richer morphology than English, lies in reducing estimation error while addressing the semantic distortion introduced by a stemmer or a lemmatiser. For this purpose, we propose a methodology for selective stemming, based on a semantic distortion metric. The proposed algorithm is tested on the task of similarity estimation between words using two types of corpus-based similarity metrics: co-occurrence-based and context-based. The performance on morphologically rich languages is boosted by stemming with the context-based metric, unlike English, where the best results are obtained by the co-occurrence-based metric. A key finding is that the estimation error reduction is different when a word is used as a feature, rather than when it is used as a target word.
Anthology ID:
L14-1731
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/973_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kalliopi Zervanou, Elias Iosif, and Alexandros Potamianos. 2014. Word Semantic Similarity for Morphologically Rich Languages. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Word Semantic Similarity for Morphologically Rich Languages (Zervanou et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/973_Paper.pdf