A Supervised Method of Feature Weighting for Measuring Semantic Relatedness

The clustering of related words is crucial for a variety of Natural Language Processing applications. Many known techniques of word clustering use the context of a word to determine its meaning. Words which frequently appear in similar contexts are assumed to have similar meanings. Word clustering usually applies the weighting of contexts, based on some measure of their importance. One of the most popular measures is Pointwise Mutual Information. It increases the weight of contexts where a word appears regularly but other words do not, and decreases the weight of contexts where many words may appear. Essentially, it is unsupervised feature weighting. We present a method of supervised feature weighting. It identifies contexts shared by pairs of words known to be semantically related or unrelated, and then uses Pointwise Mutual Information to weight these contexts on how well they indicate closely related words. We use Roget’s Thesaurus as a source of training and evaluation data. This work is as a step towards adding new terms to Roget’s Thesaurus automatically, and doing so with high confidence.