Detecting Inter-domain Semantic Shift using Syntactic Similarity

This poster is a preliminary report of our experiments for detecting semantically shifted terms between different domains for the purposes of new concept extraction. A given term in one domain may represent a different concept in another domain. In our approach, we quantify the degree of similarity of words between different domains by measuring the degree of overlap in their domain-specific semantic spaces. The domain-specific semantic spaces are defined by extracting families of syntactically similar words, i.e. words that occur in the same syntactic context. Our method does not rely on any external resources other than a syntactic parser. Yet it has the potential to extract semantically shifted terms between two different domains automatically while paying close attention to contextual information. The organization of the poster is as follows: Section 1 provides our motivation. Section 2 provides an overview of our NLP technology and explains how we extract syntactically similar words. Section 3 describes the design of our experiments and our method. Section 4 provides our observations and preliminary results. Section 5 presents some work to be done in the future and concluding remarks.