Distributional Measures of Semantic Distance: A Survey

Understand

The ability to mimic human notions of semantic distance has widespread applications.

• Some measures rely only on raw text (distributional measures) and some rely on knowledge sources such as WordNet.
• Although extensive studies have been performed to compare WordNet-based measures with human judgment, the use of distributional measures as proxies to estimate semantic distance has received little attention.
• Even though they have traditionally performed poorly when compared to WordNet-based measures, they lay claim to certain uniquely attractive features, such as their applicability in resource-poor languages and their ability to mimic both semantic similarity and semantic relatedness.