Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is generated by heterogenous ‘information communities’ that co-operate to produce reusable units of geographic knowledge. A consensual lexicon is a key factor to enable this open production model. Lexical definitions help demarcate the boundaries of terms, forming a thin semantic ground on which knowledge can travel. In VGI, lexical definitions often app...

Wordnet::Similarity is an important instrument used for many applications. It has been available for a while as a toolkit for English and it has been frequently tested on English gold standards. In this paper, we describe how we constructed a Dutch gold standard that matches the English gold standard as closely as possible. We also re-implemented the WordNet::Similarity package to be able to de...

We present our UWB system for Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task at SemEval 2016. Given two sentences, the system estimates the degree of their semantic similarity. We use state-of-the-art algorithms for the meaning representation and combine them with the best performing approaches to STS from previous years. These methods benefit from various sources of information, such as lexical, synta...

This paper presents a study on the interpretation and bracketing of noun compounds (“NCs”), based on lexical semantics. Our primary goal is to develop a method to automatically interpret NCs through the use of semantic relations. Our NC interpretation method is based on lexical similarity with tagged NCs, based on lexical similarity measures derived fromWordNet. We apply the interpretation meth...

Lexical resource alignment has been an active field of research over the last decade. However, prior methods for aligning lexical resources have been either specific to a particular pair of resources, or heavily dependent on the availability of hand-crafted alignment data for the pair of resources to be aligned. Here we present a unified approach that can be applied to an arbitrary pair of lexi...

The paper presents and evaluates an efficient algorithm for measuring semantic similarity of texts. Calculating the level of semantic similarity of texts is a very difficult task and the proposed up to now methods suffer from computational complexity. This substantially limits their application area. The proposed algorithm tries to reduce the problem by merging a computationally efficient stati...

This paper investigates novel methods for incorporating syntactic information in probabilistic latent variable models of lexical choice and contextual similarity. The resulting models capture the effects of context on the interpretation of a word and in particular its effect on the appropriateness of replacing that word with a potentially related one. Evaluating our techniques on two datasets, ...

We present PEM, the first fully automatic metric to evaluate the quality of paraphrases, and consequently, that of paraphrase generation systems. Our metric is based on three criteria: adequacy, fluency, and lexical dissimilarity. The key component in our metric is a robust and shallow semantic similarity measure based on pivot language N-grams that allows us to approximate adequacy independent...