A Semantic Representation Based-on Term Co-occurrence Network and Graph Kernel

This paper proposes a new semantic representation and its associated similarity measure. The representation expresses textual context observed in a context of a certain term as a network where nodes are terms and edges are the number of cooccurrences between connected terms. To compare terms represented in networks, a graph kernel is adopted as a similarity measure. The proposed representation has two notable merits compared with previous semantic representations. First, it can process polysemous words in a better way than a vector representation. A network of a polysemous term is regarded as a combination of sub-networks that represent senses and the appropriate sub-network is identified by context before compared by the kernel. Second, the representation permits not only words but also senses or contexts to be represented directly from corresponding set of terms. The validity of the representation and its similarity measure is evaluated with two tasks: synonym test and unsupervised word sense disambiguation. The method performed well and could compete with the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.