Corpora: measures of semantic distance in wordnet

[ted pedersen]

We are happy to announce the availability of a free, open-source Perl
package that implements a variety of semantic distance measures
that can be used in conjunction with WordNet.

Distance-0.1 implements the semantic distance measures described by
Leacock & Chodorow (1998), Jiang & Conrath (1997), Resnik (1995), Lin
(1998) and Hirst & St. Onge (1998). These five measures were the subject
of a study by Budanitsky & Hirst (2001) that provided the inspiration
for undertaking this project. (Complete references are in the README.)

The package has an easy to use command-line interface. A user specifies
a distance measure and two words. It will output the measure of
semantic distance between those two words according to that measure.

You can download this package (or view the README) at :

http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/tools.html

You will need to have WordNet and QueryData (a Perl Module) available.

QueryData : http://www.ai.mit.edu/~jrennie/WordNet/
WordNet : http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

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The Budanitsky and Hirst paper provides a good introduction to all of
these measures, and can be found at:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/compling/Publications/Abstracts/Papers/Budanitsky+Hirst-2001-abs.html

Enjoy! Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

--
# Ted Pedersen                            http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse #
# Department of Computer Science                      tpederse at d.umn.edu #
# University of Minnesota Duluth                                         #
# Duluth, MN 55812                                        (218) 726-8770 #