WikiWalk: Random walks on Wikipedia for Semantic Relatedness

Computing semantic relatedness of natural language texts is a key component of tasks such as information retrieval and summarization, and often depends on knowledge from a broad range of real-world concepts and relationships. We address this knowledge integration issue with a method of computing semantic relatedness using personalized PageRank (random walks) on a graph derived from Wikipedia. This paper evaluates methods for building the graph, including link selection strategies, and two methods for representing input texts as distributions over the graph nodes: one based on a dictionary lookup, the other based on Explicit Semantic Analysis. We evaluate our techniques on standard word relatedness and text similarity datasets, finding that they capture similarity information complementary to existing Wikipedia-based relatedness measures, resulting in small improvements over a state of the art measure.