Semantic-based Estimation of Term Informativeness

The idea that some words carry more semantic content than others, has led to the notion of term specificity, or informativeness. Computational estimation of this quantity is important for various applications such as information retrieval. We propose a new method of computing term specificity, based on modeling the rate of learning of word meaning in Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). We analyze the performance of this method both qualitatively and quantitatively and demonstrate that it shows excellent performance compared to existing methods on a broad range of tests. We also demonstrate how it can be used to improve existing applications in information retrieval and summarization.