There are at least two kinds of similarity. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason:stone is analogous to the pair carpenter:wood. This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, and information retrieval. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval has been adapted to measuring relational similarity, achieving a score of 47 % on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically from the corpus, (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency data, and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore variations of the word pairs. LRA achieves 56 % on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying semantic relations, LRA achieves similar gains over the VSM. 1.

(LRA), a method for measuring semantic similarity. LRA measures similarity in the semantic relations between two pairs of words. When two pairs have a high degree of relational similarity, they are analogous. For example, the pair cat:meow is analogous to the pair dog:bark. There is evidence from cognitive science that relational similarity is fundamental to many cognitive and linguistic tasks (e.g., analogical reasoning). In the Vector Space Model (VSM) approach to measuring relational similarity, the similarity between two pairs is calculated by the cosine of the angle between the vectors that represent the two pairs. The elements in the vectors are based on the frequencies of manually constructed patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends

Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term–document, word–context, and pair–pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field. 1.

Abstract. We present an algorithm for learning from unlabeled text, based on the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval, that can solve verbal analogy questions of the kind found in the SAT college entrance exam. A verbal analogy has the form A:B::C:D, meaning “A is to B as C is to D”; for example, mason:stone::carpenter:wood. SAT analogy questions provide a word pair, A:B, and the problem is to select the most analogous word pair, C:D, from a set of five choices. The VSM algorithm correctly answers 47 % of a collection of 374 collegelevel analogy questions (random guessing would yield 20 % correct; the average college-bound senior high school student answers about 57 % correctly). We motivate this research by applying it to a difficult problem in natural language processing, determining semantic relations in noun-modifier pairs. The problem is to classify a noun-modifier pair, such as “laser printer”, according to the semantic relation between the noun (printer) and the modifier (laser). We use a supervised nearestneighbour algorithm that assigns a class to a given noun-modifier pair by finding the most analogous noun-modifier pair in the training data. With 30 classes of semantic relations, on a collection of 600 labeled noun-modifier pairs, the learning algorithm attains an F value of 26.5 % (random guessing: 3.3%). With 5 classes of semantic relations, the F value is 43.2 % (random: 20%). The performance is state-of-the-art for both verbal analogies and noun-modifier relations.

We present an unsupervised learning algorithm that mines large text corpora for patterns that express implicit semantic relations. For a given input word pair X: Y with some unspecified semantic relations, the corresponding output list of patterns P 1, , Pm is ranked according to how well each pattern P i expresses the relations between X and Y. For example, given X = ostrich and Y = bird, the two highest ranking output patterns are “X is the largest Y ” and “Y such as the X”. The output patterns are intended to be useful for finding further pairs with the same relations, to support the construction of lexicons, ontologies, and semantic networks. The patterns are sorted by pertinence, where the pertinence of a pattern P i for a word pair X: Y is the expected relational similarity between the given pair and typical pairs for P i. The algorithm is empirically evaluated on two tasks, solving multiple-choice SAT word analogy questions and classifying semantic relations in noun-modifier pairs. On both tasks, the algorithm achieves stateof-the-art results, performing significantly better than several alternative pattern ranking algorithms, based on tf-idf. 1

We present a novel framework for the discovery and representation of general semantic relationships that hold between lexical items. We propose that each such relationship can be identified with a cluster of patterns that captures this relationship. We give a fully unsupervised algorithm for pattern cluster discovery, which searches, clusters and merges highfrequency words-based patterns around randomly selected hook words. Pattern clusters can be used to extract instances of the corresponding relationships. To assess the quality of discovered relationships, we use the pattern clusters to automatically generate SAT analogy questions. We also compare to a set of known relationships, achieving very good results in both methods. The evaluation (done in both English and Russian) substantiates the premise that our pattern clusters indeed reflect relationships perceived by humans.

Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle

We present a simple linguistically-motivated method for characterizing the semantic relations that hold between two nouns. The approach leverages the vast size of the Web in order to build lexically-specific features. The main idea is to look for verbs, prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions that can help make explicit the hidden relations between the target nouns. Using these features in instance-based classifiers, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on various relational similarity problems, including mapping noun-modifier pairs to abstract relations like TIME, LOCATION and CONTAINER, characterizing linguistic predicates like CAUSE, USE, and FROM, classifying the relations between nominals in context, and solving SAT verbal analogy problems. In essence, the approach puts together some existing ideas, showing that they apply generally to various semantic tasks, finding that verbs are especially useful features. 1

There are many possible different semantic relationships between nominals. Classification of such relationships is an important and difficult task (for example, the well known noun compound classification task is a special case of this problem). We propose a novel pattern clusters method for nominal relationship (NR) classification. Pattern clusters are discovered in a large corpus independently of any particular training set, in an unsupervised manner. Each of the extracted clusters corresponds to some unspecified semantic relationship. The pattern clusters are then used to construct features for training and classification of specific inter-nominal relationships. Our NR classification evaluation strictly follows the ACL SemEval-07 Task 4 datasets and protocol, obtaining an f-score of 70.6, as opposed to 64.8 of the best previous work that did not use the manually provided WordNet sense disambiguation tags.

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