Context Comparison As A Minimum Cost Flow Problem

Comparing word contexts is a key component of many NLP tasks, but rarely is it used in conjunction with additional ontological knowledge. One problem is that the amount of overhead required can be high. In this paper, we provide a graphical method which easily combines an ontology with contextual information. We take advantage of the intrinsic graphical structure of an ontology for representing a context. In addition, we turn the ontology into a metric space, such that subgraphs within it, which represent contexts, can be compared. We develop two variants of our graphical method for comparing contexts. Our analysis indicates that our method performs the comparison efficiently and offers a competitive alternative to non-graphical methods.