Knowledge Derived From strongWikipediastrong For Computing Semantic.pdf

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 30 (2007) 181-2 12 Submitted 03/07; published 10/07 Knowledge Derived From Wikipedia For Computing Semantic Relatedness Simone Paolo Ponzetto PONZETTO @EML -RESEARCH .DE Michael Strube STRUBE @EML -RESEARCH .DE EML Research gGmbH, Natural Language Processing Group Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 33, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany http://www.eml-research.de/nlp Abstract Wikipedia provides a semantic network for computing semantic relatedness in a more structured fashion than a search engine and with more coverage than WordNet. We present experiments on using Wikipedia for computing semantic relatedness and compare it to WordNet on various bench- marking datasets. Existing relatedness measures perform better using Wikipedia than a baseline given by Google counts, and we show that Wikipedia outperforms WordNet on some datasets. We also address the question whether and how Wikipedia can be integrated into NLP applications as a knowledge base. Including Wikipedia improves the performance of a machine learning based coreference resolution system, indicating that it represents a valuable resource for NLP applica- tions. Finally, we show that our method can be easily used for languages other than English by computing semantic relatedness for a German dataset. 1. Introduction While most advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been made recently by investi- gating data-driven methods, namely statistical techniques, we believe that further advances crucially depend on the availability of world and domain knowledge. This is essential for high-level linguis- tic tasks which require language understanding c