Synonymy – different words with the same meaning – is a major problem for text mining systems. We have proposed asymmetric word similarities as a possible solution to this problem, where the similarity between words is computed on the basis of the similarities between contexts in which the words appear, rather than on their syntactic identity. In this paper, we give details of an incremental algorithm to compute word similarities and outline some tests which show the method’s effectiveness.
Trevor P. Martin, Masrah Azmi-Murad