A New Similarity Measure for Automatic Construction of the Unknown Word Lexical Dictionary

This article deals with research that automatically constructs a lexical dictionary of unknown words. The lexical dictionary has been usefully applied to various fields for semantic information processing. It has limitations in which it only processes terms defined in the dictionary. Under this circumstance, the concept of "Unknown Word (UW)" is defined. UW, in this research, is considered a word not defined in WordNet. Here is where a new method to construct UW lexical dictionary through inputting various document collections scattered on the web is proposed. We grasp related terms of UW and measure semantic relatedness (similarity) between an UW and a related term(s). The relatedness is obtained by calculating both probabilistic relationship and semantic relationship. This research can extend UW lexical dictionary with an abundant number of UW. It is also possible to prepare a foundation for semantic retrieval by simultaneously using the UW lexical dictionary and WordNet. [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]