A method for monolingual thesauri merging

Thesauri merging is the activity of consolidating a set of thesauri into a thesaurus which accommodates the vocabularies and the structure of all thesauri being merged. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for monolingual thesauri merging. We also present a domain independent set-theoretic model for the representation of terms, relationships, and integrity constraints. Finally, we present a method for the merging of monolingual thesauri focusing on its mechanisms for the detection of equivalent terms among the thesauri being merged. Our method expands previous work on the problem; we introduce equivalence assumptions that express similarity between terms and we propose a term distance model which can be used to guide the confirmation or rejection of equivalence assumptions.