Exploring the Relationship between Semantic Spaces and Semantic Relations

This study examines the relationship between two kinds of semantic spaces — i.e., spaces based on term frequency (tf) and word cooccurrence frequency (co) — and four semantic relations — i.e., synonymy, coordination, superordination, and collocation — by comparing, for each semantic relation, the performance of two semantic spaces in predicting word association. The simulation experiment demonstrates that the tf-based spaces perform better in predicting word association based on the syntagmatic relation (i.e., superordination and collocation), while the co-based semantic spaces are suited for predicting word association based on the paradigmatic relation (i.e., synonymy and coordination). In addition, the co-based space with a larger context size yields better performance for the syntagmatic relation, while the co-based space with a smaller context size tends to show better performance for the paradigmatic relation. These results indicate that different semantic spaces can be used depending on what kind of semantic relatedness should be computed.