Empirical Measurements of Lexical Similarity in Noun Phrase Conjuncts

The ability to detect similarity in conjunct heads is potentially a useful tool in helping to disambiguate coordination structures a difficult task for parsers. We propose a distributional measure of similarity designed for such a task. We then compare several different measures of word similarity by testing whether they can empirically detect similarity in the head nouns of noun phrase conjuncts in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) treebank. We demonstrate that several measures of word similarity can successfully detect conjunct head similarity and suggest that the measure proposed in this paper is the most appropriate for this task.