[Corpora-List] Summary: Specificty and Similarity of Words

[Ergin Altintas]

Dear corpra members;

Sorry for my sending of the same message describing my questions about
Specificty and Similarity of Words three times (on Wed, 16 Mar 2005
19:56:58 +0200). It was because of an error report returned by the
maillist server which I couldn't understand because it wasn't in
English.

Any way there were 3 answers for my questions:

1. Nuno Seco referred to a work of his own. And this is what I was
exactly looking for. I had a review of the paper, good work.
http://afflatus.ucd.ie/~ebbis/seco.pdf

2. Mark Sanderson noted IDF and Karen Sparck Jones's ideas about
specificty. They were mainly dependent on large copora. And that was
not what I was looking for (yes I had not mentioned about "no
corpora"). I wasnt famialiar to IDF and for the ones who consider to
learn more about IDF's I think I should sahre this brief page having
links to original resources is located here:
http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ser/idf.html

3. Ronald P. Reck said, he used Ted Pedersen's
WordNet::Similarity package sucessfully. Yes. I also use this
package and its great to have such open source projects for a good
starts in CL. (But in fact this wasn't an answer for my questions)
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/similarity.html

I am still looking for similar work as in (1).

And one of my questions is not aswered yet exactly:

How should similarity measures be evaluated? Is it enough to show the
correlation to human judgements or shall we give practical
results of application areas? (like WSD, IR, etc...)

Thanks to everyone who had interest in my questions.

Best Wishes,


Ergin ALTINTAS
Turkish Naval Academy