SIMTEX: An Approach for Detecting and Measuring Textual Similarity based on Discourse and Semantics

Nowadays automatic systems for detecting and measuring textual similarity are being developed, in order to apply them to different tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Currently, these systems use surface linguistic features or statistical information. Nowadays, few researchers use deep linguistic information. In this work, we present an algorithm for detecting and measuring textual similarity that takes into account information offered by discourse relations of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), and lexical-semantic relations included in EuroWordNet. We apply the algorithm, called SIMTEX, to texts written in Spanish, but the methodology is potentially language-independent.