A Dependency Graph Isomorphism for News Sentence Searching

Given that the amount of news being published is only increasing, an effective search tool is invaluable to many Web-based companies. With word-based approaches ignoring much of the information in texts, we propose Destiny, a linguistic approach that leverages the syntactic information in sentences by representing sentences as graphs with disambiguated words as nodes and grammatical relations as edges. Destiny performs approximate sub-graph isomorphism on the query graph and the news sentence graphs, exploiting word synonymy as well as hypernymy. Employing a custom corpus of user-rated queries and sentences, the algorithm is evaluated using the normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain, Spearman’s Rho, and Mean Average Precision and it is shown that Destiny performs significantly better than a TF-IDF baseline on the considered measures and corpus.