IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)

Improving Word Similarity by Augmenting PMI with Estimates of Word Polysemy

Lushan Han, Tim Finin, Paul McNamee, Anupam Joshi, and Yelena Yesha

June 1, 2013

Pointwise mutual information (PMI) is a widely used word similarity measure, but it lacks a clear explanation of how it works. We explore how PMI differs from distributional similarity, and we introduce a novel metric, PMImax, that augments PMI with information about a word's number of senses. The coefficients of PMImax are determined empirically by maximizing a utility function based on the performance of automatic thesaurus generation. We show that it outperforms traditional PMI in the application of automatic thesaurus generation and in two word similarity benchmark tasks: human similarity ratings and TOEFL synonym questions. PMImax achieves a correlation coefficient comparable to the best knowledge-based approaches on the Miller-Charles similarity rating dataset.

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Tags: ontology, pointwise mutual information, semantic similarity, semantics, synonyms, word similarity

Type: Article

Publisher: IEEE Computer Society

Volume: 25

Number: 6

Note:

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