[Corpora-List] Semantic Distances Revisited

[PbIKOB_B.B.]

              Daniel and Chris - my remark.

  Just regarding positioning of both approaches.

  IMHO in Traditional Linguistics terms (there are some survivors here) the 1st one belongs to SD in Language and the last one - to SD in Speech.

  My apologies in advance to our CL list members pained by my explanation and mentioning Traditional Linguistics.

          Vladimir



>>>It's great stuff, although it's taxonomy-based.
>>>I was specifically interested in distributional methods.
>
>>  And what is the difference - if it is possible to answer?
>
>I'll give it a try -- apologies in advance to more-experienced list members
>pained by my explanation.
>
>In a taxonomy, items are typically represented as nodes of a tree. So when
>you're measuring how similar two items are, you find them both on the tree,
>and then calculate how close they are to each other. (There are different
>ways to do this, and that's where the Hirst and Budanitsky article comes
>in.)
>It's a great approach, if you have the taxonomy already built for you.
>The pitfalls of making a taxonomy are well-known: it's a lot of work, your
>taxonomy may not hold across languages, and it's hard not to let your
>taxonomy reflect your biases.
>
>Distribution-based methods don't use a taxonomy; they attempt to find
>similarity based on the surrounding words. Again, there are many ways to do
>this, but the underlying assumption is that words that appear in similar
>contexts are similar to each other. E.g. Beth Levin in her work with
>English verb classes, makes the striking assertion that verbs that exhibit
>similar syntactic behaviour are semantically related. Quite a revelation
>for a linguist such as myself -- linguists have traditionally studied
>syntax, while putting semantics in the "too-hard" basket. This work showed
>that syntax can be a key to semantics.
>
>That's a really basic overview.
>Phil Resnik gives a thorough review of both kinds of methods in his
>dissertation. You can find it at:
>http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/resnik93selection.html
>His Lexical Acquisition talk at ACL 2002 changed my life. And may I add,
>he's one heck of a dancer.
>
>Feedback welcome.
>Daniel
>
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>Daniel Midgley
>dmidgley at arts.uwa.edu.au
>+ (61 8) 9371 3730
>http://www.cs.uwa.edu.au/~fontor
>
>
>
>


--

    P bI K O B  B.B.   MOCKBA

Vladimir Rykov, PhD in Computational Linguistics,
 MOSCOW
http://rykov.narod.ru/
Engl. http://www.blkbox.com/~gigawatt/rykov.html
Tel +7-903-749-19-99