Word semantic similarity for morphologically rich languages

Kalliopi Zervanou, Elias Iosif, Alexandros Potamianos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Sara Goggi, Thierry Declerck, Joseph Mariani, Bente Maegaard, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Helene Mazo, Stelios Piperidis, Hrafn Loftsson
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages1642-1648
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9782951740884
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Event9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014 - Reykjavik, Iceland
Duration: 26 May 201431 May 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014
Country/TerritoryIceland
CityReykjavik
Period26/05/1431/05/14

Keywords

  • Distributional semantic models
  • Lexical semantics
  • Morphologically rich languages
  • Morphology

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