Syntactic-Based Methods for Measuring Word Similarity

This paper explores different strategies for extracting similarity relations between words from partially parsed text corpora. The strategies we have analysed do not require supervised training nor semantic information available from general lexical resources. They differ in the amount and the quality of the syntactic contexts against which words are compared. The paper presents in details the notion of syntactic context and how syntactic information could be used to extract semantic regularities of word sequences. Finally, experimental tests with Portuguese corpus demonstrate that similarity measures based on fine-grained and elaborate syntactic contexts perform better than those based on poorly defined contexts.