Wisdom of crowds versus wisdom of linguists - measuring the semantic relatedness of words

In this article, we present a comprehensive study aimed at computing semantic relatedness of word pairs. We analyze the performance of a large number of semantic relatedness measures proposed in the literature with respect to different experimental conditions, such as (i) the datasets employed, (ii) the language (English or German), (iii) the underlying knowledge source, and (iv) the evaluation task (computing scores of semantic relatedness, ranking word pairs, solving word choice problems). To our knowledge, this study is the first to systematically analyze semantic relatedness on a large number of datasets with different properties, while emphasizing the role of the knowledge source compiled either by the ‘wisdom of linguists’ (i.e., classical wordnets) or by the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (i.e., collaboratively constructed knowledge sources like Wikipedia). The article discusses benefits and drawbacks of different approaches to evaluating semantic relatedness. We show that res...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NLE
• Authors: Torsten Zesch, Iryna Gurevych
• Keywords: Knowledge Sources, NLE 2010, Semantic Relatedness, first Paragraph