Paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic relations: How are they related?

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the relationship between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) descriptors assigned to the same document are chosen to represent the syntagmatic relations and their paradigmatic relations are determined using the structure of the MeSH thesaurus. With the help of MeSH tree structure, we determined the paradigmatic relations between each pair of assigned descriptors for each document (if there is any). The results show that paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic relations can coexist, but it is not very common. Only 13.56% of the pairs of descriptors are connectable on the MeSH tree, and thus can be said to have some paradigmatic relations. It generally takes 3 to 5 steps on the tree for these pairs of descriptors to reach each other. The results also show that the strength of the paradigmatic relations depends on the specificity of the descriptors. The more specific a pair of descriptors are, the stronger paradigmatic relations they are likely to have. When the assigned descriptors are very general, they are less likely to have strong paradigmatic relations (e.g. parent‐child or siblings relations). The findings of this study can help better use of sematic relations for different applications such as ontology construction, information extraction, information retrieval, question‐answering, and text summarization.