基於《知網》的辭彙語義相似度計算 (Word Similarity Computing Based on How-net)

Word similarity is broadly used in many applications, such as information retrieval, information extraction, text classification, word sense disambiguation, example-based machine translation, etc. There are two different methods used to compute similarity: one is based on ontology or a semantic taxonomy; the other is based on collocations of words in a corpus. As a lexical knowledgebase with rich semantic information, How-net has been employed in various researches. Unlike other thesauri, such as WordNet and Tongyici Cilin, in which word similarity is defined based on the distance between words in a semantic taxonomy tree, How-net defines a word in a complicated multi-dimensional knowledge description language. As a result, a series of problems arise in the process of word similarity computation using How-net. The difficulties are outlined below: 1. The description of each word consists of a group of sememes. For example, the Chinese word “暗箱(camera obscura)” is described as: “part|部件, #TakePicture|拍摄, %tool|用具, body|身”, and the Chinese word “写信(write a letter)” is described as: “write|写, ContentProduct=letter|信件”; 2. The meaning of a word is not a simple combination of these sememes. Sememes are organized using a specific knowledge description language. To meet these challenges, our work includes: 1. A study on the How-net knowledge description language. We rewrite the How-net definition of a word in a more structural format, using the abstract data structure of set and feature structure. 2. A study on the algorithm used to compute word similarity based on How-net. The similarity between sememes, that between sets, and that between feature structures are given. To compute the similarity between two sememes, we