Experiments on linguistically-based term associations

Abstract

A description of the hyperterm system REALIST (REtrieval Aids by LInguistics and STatistics) and in more detail a description of its semantic component is given. We call a hyperterm system a system that contains different kinds of term relations. The semantic component of REALIST generates semantic term relations such as synonyms. It takes as input a free-text database and generates as output term pairs that are semantically related with respect to their meanings in the database. This is done in two steps. In the first step an automatic syntactic analysis provides linguistical knowledge about the terms of the database. In the second step this knowledge is compared by statistical similarity computation. Various experiments with different similarity measures are described. These experiments are not standard recall and precision examinations, but direct evaluations of the term pairs. Beyond the new linguistic term association method and its good results, another important point of this paper is to show the value of direct term pair evaluation.