Towards Quantitative Concept Analysis

In this paper, we present an approach to the automatic extraction of conceptual structures from unorganized collections of documents using large scale lexical regularities in text. The technique maps a term to a constellation of other terms that captures the essential meaning of the term in question. The methodology is language independent, it involves an exploration of a document collection in which the initial term occurs (e.g., the collection returned by a search engine when being queried with this term) and the building of a network in which each node is assigned to a term. The weights of the connections between nodes are strengthened each time the terms that these nodes represent appear together in a context of a predefined length. Possible applications are automatic concept map generation, terminology extraction, term retrieval, term translation, term localization, etc. The system is currently under development although preliminary experiments show promising results.