Similarity between Words 
Computed by Spreading Activation on an English Dictionary 
Hideki Kozima 
Course in Computer Science 
.... and Information Mathematics, 
Graduate School, 
University of Electro-Communications 
1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofu, 
Tokyo 182, Japan 
(xkozima@phaeton. cs. uec. ac. j p) 
Teiji Furugori 
Department of Computer Science 
and Information Mathematics, 
University of Electro-Communications 
1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofu, 
Tokyo 182, Japan 
Tel. +81-424-83-2161 (ex.4461) 
(furugori@phaet on. cs. uec. ac. jp) 
Abstract 
This paper proposes a method for measur- 
ing semantic similarity between words as 
a new tool for text analysis. The simi- 
larity is measured on a semantic network 
constructed systematically from a subset 
of the English dictionary, LDOCE (Long- 
man Dictionary of Contemporary English). 
Spreading activation on the network can di- 
rectly compute the similarity between any 
two words in the Longman Defining Vocab- 
ulary, and indirectly the similarity of all the 
other words in LDOCE. The similarity rep- 
resents the strength of lexical cohesion or 
semantic relation, and also provides valu- 
able information about similarity and co- 
herence of texts. 
1 Introduction 
A text is not just a sequence of words, but it also has 
coherent structure. The meaning of each word in a 
text depends on the structure of the text. Recogniz- 
ing the structure of text is an essential task in text 
understanding.\[Grosz and Sidner, 1986\] 
One of the valuable indicators of the structure of 
text is lexical cohesion.\[Halliday and Hasan, 1976\] 
Lexical cohesion is the relationship between words, 
classified as follows: 
1. Reiteration: 
Molly likes cats. She keeps a cat. 
2. Semantic relation: 
a. Desmond saw a cat. It was Molly's pet. 
b. Molly goes to the north. Not east. 
c. Desmond goes to a theatre. He likes films. 
Reiteration of words is easy to capture by morpho- 
logical analysis. Semantic relation between words, 
which is the focus of this paper, is hard to recognize 
by computers. 
We consider lexical cohesion as semantic similarity 
between words. Similarity is Computed by spread- 
ing activation (or association) \[Waltz and Pollack, 
1985\] on a semantic network constructed systemati- 
cally from an English dictionary. Whereas it is edited 
by some lexicographers, a dictionary is a set of asso- 
ciative relation shared by the people in a linguistic 
community. 
The similarity between words is a mapping a: Lx 
L ---* \[0, 1\], where L is a set of words (or lexicon). 
The following examples suggest the feature of the 
similarity: 
a(cat, pet) = 0.133722 (similar), 
a(cat, mat) = 0.002692 (dissimilar). 
The value of a(w, w') increases with strength of se- 
mantic relation between w and w'. 
The following section examines related work in or- 
der to clarify the nature of the semantic similarity. 
Section 3 describes how the semantic network is sys- 
tematically constructed from the English dictionary. 
Section 4 explains how to measure the similarity by 
spreading activation on the semantic network. Sec- 
tion 5 shows applications of the similarity measure -- 
computing similarity between texts, and measuring 
coherence of a text. Section 6 discusses the theoret- 
ical aspects of the similarity. 
2 Related Work on Measuring 
Similarity 
Words in a language are organized by two kinds of 
relationship. One is a syntagmatic relation: how the 
words are arranged in sequential texts. The other is a 
232 
"polite" 
azlgulax I I I '. ~.~ I I rounded 
veak : : : : ; ~1 I strong 
rough : : : : : ' ~: : Booth 
active ' ' ' ~' ....... : passive 
small I I l~ : l I I large 
cold .... I , , , : hot 
good "' ~'I'~' " ; ; I bad 
fresh ...... I I stale 
Figure 1. A psycholinguistic measurement 
(semantic differential \[Osgood, 1952\]). 
paradigmatic relation: how the words are associated 
with each other. Similarity between words can be 
defined by either a syntagmatic or a paradigmatic 
relation. 
Syntagmatic similarity is based on co-occurrence 
data extracted from corpora \[Church and Hanks, 
1990\], definitions in dictionaries \[Wilks etal., 1989\], 
and so on. Paradigmatic similarity is based on 
association data extracted from thesauri \[Morris 
and Hirst, 1991\], psychological experiments \[Osgood, 
1952\], and so on. 
This paper concentrates on paradigmatic similar- 
ity, because a paradigmatic relation can be estab- 
lished both inside a sentence and across sentence 
boundaries, while syntagmatic relations can be seen 
mainly inside a sentence -- like syntax deals with 
sentence structure. The rest of this section fo- 
cuses on two related works on measuring paradig- 
matic similarity -- a psycholinguistic approach and 
a thesaurus-based approach. 
2.1 A Psycholinguistic Approach 
Psycholinguists have been proposed methods for 
measuring similarity. One of the pioneering works 
is 'semantic differential' \[Osgood, 1952\] which anal- 
yses meaning of words into a range of different di- 
mensions with the opposed adjectives at both ends 
(see Figure 1), and locates the words in the semantic 
space. 
Recent works on knowledge representation are 
somewhat related to Osgood's semantic differential. 
Most of them describe meaning of words using special 
symbols like microfeatures \[Waltz and Pollack, 1985; 
Hendler, 1989\] that correspond to the semantic di- 
mensions. 
However, the following problems arise from the 
semantic differential procedure as measurement of 
meaning. The procedure is not based on the deno- 
tative meaning of a word, but only on the connota- 
tive emotions attached to the word; it is difficult to 
choose the relevant dimensions, i.e. the dimensions 
required for the sufficient semantic space. 
2.2 A Thesaurus-based Approach 
Morris and Hirst \[1991\] used Roget's thesaurus as 
knowledge base for determining whether or not two 
words are semantically related. For example, the 
semantic relation of truck/car and drive/car are 
captured in the following way: 
1. truck E vehicle B car 
(both are included in the vehicle class), 
2. drive E journey ~ vehicle B car 
Oourney refersto vehicle). 
This method can capture Mmost all types of se- 
mantic relations (except emotional and situational 
relation), such as paraphrasing by superordinate (ex. 
cat/pet), systematic relation (ex. north/east), and 
non-systematic relation (ex. theatre/fi\]~). 
However, thesauri provide neither information 
about semantic difference between words juxtaposed 
in a category, nor about strength of the semantic re- 
lation between words -- both are to be dealt in this 
paper. The reason is that thesauri axe designed to 
help writers find relevant words, not to provide the 
meaning of words. 
3 Paradigme: A Field for Measuring 
Similarity 
We analyse word meaning in terms of the seman- 
tic space defined by a semantic network, called 
Paradigme. Paradigme is systematically constructed 
from Gloss~me, a subset of an English dictionary. 
3.1 Gloss~me -- A Closed Subsystem of 
English 
A dictionary is a closed paraphrasing system of nat- 
ural language. Each of its headwords is defined by 
a phrase which is composed of the headwords and 
their derivations. A dictionary, viewed as a whole, 
looks like a tangled network of words. 
We adopted Longman Dictionary of Contemporary 
English (LDOCE) \[1987\] as such a closed system of 
English. LDOCE has a unique feature that each of 
its 56,000 headwords is defined by using the words in 
Longman Defining Vocabulary (hereafter, LDV) and 
their derivations. LDV consists of 2,851 words (as 
the headwords in LDOCE) based on the survey of 
restricted vocabulary \[West, 1953\]. 
We made a reduced version of LDOCE, called 
Glossdme. Gloss~me has every entry of LDOCE 
whose headword is included in LDV. Thus, LDVis 
defined by Gloss~me, and Glossdme is composed of ...... 
LDV. Gloss~me is a closed subsystem of English. 
GIoss~me has 2,851 entries that consist of 101,861 
words (35.73 words/entry on the average). An item 
of Gloss~me has a headword, a word-class, and one 
or more units corresponding to numbered definitions 
in the entry of LDOCE. Each unit has one head- 
part and several det-parts. The head-part is the first 
phrase in the definition, which describes the broader 
233 
red t /red/ adj -dd- 1 of the colour of blood 
or fire: a red rose~dress \[ We painted the door 
red. -- see also like a red rag to a bull 
(RAG 1) 2 (of human hair) of a bright brownish 
orange or copper colour 3 (of the human skin) 
pink, usa. for a short time: I turned red with 
embarrassment~anger. I The child's eye (= the 
skin round the eyes) were red from crying. 4 
(of wine) of a dark pink to dark purple colour 
- ~n~. \[U\] 
(red adj 
((of the colour) 
(of blood or fire) ) 
((of a bright brownish 
(of human hair) ) 
(pink 
(usu for a short time) 
(of the human akin) ) 
; headeord, eord-class 
; unit 1 -- head-part 
; det-part 
orange or copper colour) 
; unit 3 -- head-part 
; det-part 1 
; det-part 2 
((of a dark pink to dark purple colour) 
(of wine) )) 
Figure 2. A sample entry of LDOCE and a corresponding entry of Glosseme (in S-expression). 
(red_l (adj) 0.000000 ;; ;; referent 
(+ ;; eubreferant 1 
(0.333333 ;; weight of 
(* (0.001594 of_l) (0.042108 colour_2) 
(0.185058 fire_l) ;; subreferant 2 
(0.277778 (* (0.000278 of_l) 
(0.466411 orange_l) (0.007330 colour_2) 
(0.016372 hair_l) 
;; aubreferant 3 (0.222222 
(* (0.410692 pink_l) 
(0.028846 short_l) (0.000595 the_2) 
;; subreferant 4 (0.166667 
(* (0.000328 of_l) (0.123290 pink_l) 
(0.000273 to_3) (0.141273 purple_2) 
(0.338512 wine_l) 
;; refere 
headeord, word-class, and activity-value 
subreferant 1 
(0.001733 the_l) (0.001733 the_2) (0.042108 colour_l) (0.000797 of_l) (0.539281 blood_l) (0.000529 or_l) 
(0.185058 fire_2) )) 
(0.000196 a_l) (0.030997 bright_l) (0.065587 broen_l) (0.000184 or_l) (0.385443 copper_l) (0.007330 colour_l) 
(0.000139 of_l) (0.009868 human_l) (0.009868 human_2) )) 
(0.410692 pink_2) (0.003210 for_l) (0.000386 a_l) 
(0.006263 time_l) (0.000547 of_l) (0.000595 the_l) (0.038896 human_l) (0.038896 human_2) (0.060383 akin_l) )) 
(0.000232 a_l) (0.028368 daxk_l) (0.028368 dark_2) (0.123290 pink_2) (0.000273 to_1) (0.000273 to_2) 
(0.028368 dark_l) (0.028368 dark_2) (0.141273 purple_l) (0.008673 colour_l) (0.008673 colour_2) (0.000164 of_l) 
))) 
(* (0.031058 apple_l) (0.029261 blood_l) (0.008678 (0.029140 copper_l) (0.009537 diamond_l) (0.003015 
(0.006464 fox_l) (0.006152 heart_l) (0.098349 
(0.029140 orange_l) (0.007714 pepper_l) (0.196698 (0.098349 pink_2) (0.018733 purple_2) (0.028100 
(0.196698 red_2) (0.004230 signal_l) )) 
colour_l) (0.009256 fire_l) (0.073762 
lake_2) (0.007025 
pink_l) (0.012294 purple,2) (0. 098349 
Figure 3. A sample node of Paradigme (in S-expression). 
comb_l) flame_l) 
lip_i) pink_2) 
red_2) 
meaning of the headword. The det-parts restrict the 
meaning of the head-part. (See Figure 2.) 
3.2 Paradlgme -- A Semantic Network 
We then translated Gloss~me into a semantic net- 
work Paradigme. Each entry in Gloss~me is mapped 
onto a node in Paradigme. Paradigme has 2,851 
nodes and 295,914 unnamed links between the nodes 
(103.79 links/node on the average). Figure 3 shows 
a sample node red_l. Each node consists of a head- 
word, a word-class, an activity-value, and two sets 
of links: a rdf4rant and a rdfdrd. 
A r~f~rant of a node consists of several subrdfdrants 
correspond to the units of Giossdme. As shown in 
Figure 2 and 3, a morphological analysis maps the 
word bromlish in the second unit onto a link to the 
node broom_l, and the word colour onto two links 
to colour_l (adjective) and colour.2 (noun). 
A rdfdrd of a node p records the nodes referring to 
p. For example, the rdf6rd of red_l is a set of links to 
nodes (ex. apple_l) that have a link to red_t in their 
rdf~rants. The rdf6rd provides information about the 
extension of red_l, not the intension shown in the 
rdf6rant. 
Each link has thickness tk, which is computed 
from the frequency of the word wk in Gloss~me and 
other information, and normalized as )-~tk = 1 in 
each subrdf6rant or r6f~rd. Each subrdf~rant also 
has thickness (for example, 0.333333 in the first 
subrdf6rant of red_l), which is computed by the or- 
der of the units which represents significance of the 
definitions. Appendix A describes the structure of 
Paradigme in detail. 
234 
w w w' 
'(°) I I l 
Figure 4. Process of measuring the similarity a(w, w') on Paradigme. 
(1) Start activating w. (2) Produce an activated pattern. (3) Observe activity of w'. 
2 
0.8 :6 
.4' ~-~ -- 
red_2 recLl ~ 
orange_1~ ~ 
pxnk .D -M' 
blood_J copper_l~- 
purpk~-~ purpAe_~ 
rose-~ 
1.0 
4 6 8 I0 
T (steps) 
Figure 5. An activated pattern produced from red 
(changing of activity values of 10 nodes 
holding highest activity at T= 10). 
4 Computing Similarity between 
Words 
Similarity between words is computed by spreading 
activation on Paradigme. Each of its nodes can hold 
activity, and it moves through the links. Each node 
computes its activity value vi(T+ 1) at time T+ 1 as 
follows: 
v(T+l) = ¢ (Ri(T), R~(T), e,(T)), 
where Rd(T) and R~(T) are the sum of weighted ac- 
tivity (at time T) of the nodes referred in the r6f6rant 
and r~f6r6 respectively. And, ei(T) is activity given 
from outside (at time T); to 'activate a node' is to 
let ei(T) > 0. The output function ¢ sums up three 
activity values in appropriate proportion and limits 
the output value to \[0,1\]. Appendix B gives the de- 
tails of the spreading activation. 
4.1 Measuring Similarity 
Activating a node for a certain period of time causes 
the activity to spread over Paradigme and produce 
an activated pattern on it. The activated pattern ap- 
proximately gets equilibrium after 10 steps, whereas 
it will never reach the actual equilibrium. The pat- 
tern thus produced represents the meaning of the 
node or of the words related to the node by morpho- 
logical analysis 1. 
The activated pattern, produced from a word w, 
suggests similarity between w and any headword in 
LDV. The similarity a(w, w') E \[0, 1\] is computed in 
the following way. (See also Figure 4.) 
1. Reset activity of all nodes in Paradigme. 
2. Activate w with strength s(w) for 10 steps, 
where s(w) is significance of the word w. 
Then, an activated pattern P(w) is produced 
on Paradigmc. 
3. Observe a(P(w), w') -- an activity value of the 
node w' in P(w). 
Then, a(w, w') is s(w').a(P(w), w'). 
The word significance s(w) E \[0, 1\] is defined as 
the normalized information of the word w in the cor- 
pus \[West, 1953\]. For example, the word red ap- 
pears 2,308 times in the 5,487,056-word corpus, and 
the word and appears 106,064 times. So, s(red) and 
s(and) are computed as follows: 
- log(230S/5487056) 
s(red) = -- 1og(1/5487056) -- 0.500955, 
- 1og(106064/5487056) 
s(and) = -- 1og(1/5487056) = 0.254294. 
We estimated the significance of the words excluded 
from the word list \[West, 1953\] at the average sig- 
nificance of their word classes. This interpolation 
virtually enlarged West's 5,000,000-word corpus. 
For example, let us consider the similarity between 
red and orange. First, we produce an activated pat- 
tern P(red) on Paradigrae. (See Figure 5.) In 
this case, both of the nodes red..1 (adjective) and 
red_,?. (noun) are activated with strength s(red)= 
0.500955. Next, we compute s(oraage)= 0.676253, 
and observe a(P(red),orange) = 0.390774. Then, 
the similarity between red and orange is obtained 
as follows: 
a(red, orange) = 0.676253 • 0.390774 
= 0.264262 . 
XThe morphological analysis maps all words derived 
by 48 affixes in LDV onto their root forms (i.e. headwotds 
of LDOCE). 
235 
4.2 Examples of Similarity between Words 
The procedure described above can compute the sim- 
ilarity a(w, w I) between any two words w, w I in LDV 
and their derivations. Computer programs of this 
procedure- spreading activation (in C), morpho- 
logical analysis and others (in Common Lisp) -- can 
compute a(w, w') within 2.5 seconds on a worksta- 
tion (SPARCstation 2). 
The similarity ¢r between words works as an indi- 
cator of the lexical cohesion. The following exam- 
ples illustrate that a increases with the strength of 
semantic relation: 
o(wine, alcohol) = 0.118078 , 
~(wine, line) = 0.002040 , 
or(big, large) = 0.120587 , 
a(clean, large) = 0.004943 , 
a(buy, sell) = 0.135686 , 
o'(buy, walk) = 0.007993. 
The similarity ~r also increases with the 
occurrence tendency of words, for example: 
a(waiter, restaurant) = 0.175699, 
a(computer, restaurant) = 0.003268, 
a(red, blood) = 0.111443 , o(green, 
blood) = 0.002268 , 
~(dig, spade) = 0.116200, 
~r(fly, spade) = 0.003431. 
CO- 
Note that a(w, w') has direction (from w to w'), so 
that a(w, w') may not be equal to a(w', w): 
a(films, theatre) = 0.178988 , 
o(theatre, films) ---- 0.068927. 
Meaningful words should have higher similar- 
ity; meaningless words (especially, function words) 
should have lower similarity. The similarity a(w, w') 
increases with the significance s(w) and s(w') that 
represent meaningfulness of w and w': 
a(north, east) : 0.100482 , 
o'(to, theatre) : 0.007259 , 
a(films, of) = 0.005914 , 
o'(t o, the) = 0.002240. 
Note that the reflective similarity a(w,w) also de- 
pends on the significance s(w), so that cr(w,w) < 1: 
a(waiter, waiter) = 0.596803 , 
er(of, of) = 0.045256. 
4.3 Similarity of Extra Words 
The similarity of words in LDV and their derivations 
is measured directly on Paradigme; the similarity 
of extra words is measured indirectly on Paradigme 
by treating an extra word as a word list W = 
{Wl,..., wn} of its definition in LDOCE. (Note that 
each wi E W is included in LDV or their derivations.) 
The similarity between the word lists W, W ~ is de- 
fined as follows. (See aiso Figure 6.) 
or(W, W') = ¢ (~t0'ew' s(w').a(P(W),w')), 
W W' 
1MJ1, " " " ,ff3n tO1, " " " ,lOrn 
\\\ fit, 
Figure 6. Measuring similarity of entra words 
as the similarity between word fists. 
o.2"l__lF=:~, ~. i--k \ \ \ \ 
bott!e-l~h ~_ "~ ~ \ ~ 
poison_l~ ~ \[ 
swal!ow_l~ \[ i \[ I spixit _I~"--~ \[ \[ I 
2 4 6 8 I0 
T (steps) 
Figure 7. An activated pattern produced from 
the word list: {red, alcoholic, drink}. 
where P(W) is the activated pattern produced 
from W by activating each wi E W with strength s(wl)2/~ s(wk) 
for 10 steps. And, ¢ is an output 
function which limits the value to \[0,1\]. 
As shown in Figure 7, bottle_l and wine_l have 
high activity in the pattern produced from the phrase 
"red alcoholic drink". So, we may say that the over- 
lapped pattern implies % bottle of wine". 
For example, the similarity between linguistics 
and stylistics, both are the extra words, is com- 
puted as follows: 
~(linguistics, stylistics) 
= o({the, study, of, language, in, 
general, and, of, particular, 
languages, and, their, structure, 
and, grammar, and, history}, 
{the, study, of, style, in, 
written, or, spoken, language} ) 
= 0.140089. 
Obviously, both ~r(W,w) and a(w, W), where W 
is an extra word and w is not, are also computable. 
Therefore, we can compute the similarity between 
any two headwords in LDOCE and their derivations. 
236 
text: X 
xl x; x~ 
• J 
episodes 
Figure 8. Episode association on Paradigrae 
(recalling the most similar episode in memory). 
5 Applications of the Similarity 
This section shows the application of the similarity 
between words to text analysis -- measuring similar- 
ity between texts, and measuring text coherence. 
5.1 Measuring Similarity between Texts 
Suppose a text is a word list without syntactic struc- 
ture. Then, the similarity ~r(X,X') between two 
texts X, X' can be computed as the similarity of ex- 
tra words described above. 
The following examples suggest that the similar- 
ity between texts indicates the strength of coherence 
relation between them: 
~("I have a bummer.", 
"Take some nails." ) = 0.100611 , 
a("I have a bummer.", 
"Take some apples." ) = 0.005295 , 
~("I have a pen.", 
"Where is ink?" ) = 0.113140 , 
a("I have a pen.", 
"Where do you live?" ) = 0.007676 . 
It is worth noting that meaningless iteration of 
words (especially, of function words) has less influ- 
ence on the text similarity: 
a("It is a dog.", 
"That must be your dog.")= 0.252536, 
ff("It is a doE.", 
"It is a log." ) = 0.053261 . 
The text similarity provides a semantic space for 
text retrieval -- to recall the most similar text in 
X' { 1,"" X'} to the given text X. Once the ac- 
tivated pattern P(X) of the text X is produced 
on Paradigms, we can compute and compare the 
similarity a(X, XI), .-., a(X, X') immediately. (See 
Figure 8.) 
5.2 Measuring Text Coherence 
Let us consider the reflective similarity a(X, X) of 
a text X, and use the notation c(X) for a(X, X). 
Then, c(X) can be computed as follows: 
= ¢ (E. x ,(,O,(P(X).,,,)). 
The activated pattern P(X), as shown in Figure 7, 
represents the average meaning of wl @ X. So, c(X) 
represents cohesiveness of X -- or semantic closeness 
of w 6 X, or semantic compactness of X. (It is also 
closely related to distortion in clustering.) 
The following examples suggest that c(X) indi- 
cates the strength of coherence of X: 
c ("She opened the world with her 
typewriter. Her work was typing. 
But She did not type quickly." ) 
= 0.502510 (coherent), 
c ("Put on your clothes at once. 
I can not walk ten miles. 
There is no one here but me." ) 
= 0.250840 (incoherent). 
However, a cohesive text can be incoherent; the 
following example shows cohesiveness of the incoher- 
ent text -- three sentences randomly selected from 
LDOCE: 
c ("I saw a lion. 
A lion belongs to the cat family. 
My family keeps a pet." ) 
= 0.560172 (incoherent, but cohesive). 
Thus, c(X) can not capture all the aspects of text 
coherence. This is because c(X) is based only on the 
lexical cohesion of the words in X. 
6 Discussion 
The structure of Paradigme represents the knowl- 
edge system of English, and an activated state pro- 
duced on it represents word meaning. This section 
discusses the nature of the structure and states of Paradigms, 
and also the nature of the similarity com- 
puted on it. 
6.1 Paradigms and Semantic Space 
The set of all the possible activated patterns pro- 
duced on Paradigms can be considered as a seman- 
tic space where each state is represented as a point. 
The semantic space is a 2,851-dimensional hyper- 
cube; each of its edges corresponds to a word in 
LDV. 
LDV is selected according to the following infor- 
mation: the word frequency in written English, and 
the range of contexts in which each word appears. 
So, LDV has a potential for covering all the concepts 
commonly found in the world. 
This implies the completeness of LDV as dimen- 
sions of the semantic space. Osgood's semantic dif- 
ferential procedure \[1952\] used 50 adjective dimen- 
sions; our semantic measurement uses 2,851 dimen- 
sions with completeness and objectivity. 
Our method can be applied to construct a se- 
mantic network from an ordinary dictionary whose 
237 
defining vocabulary is not restricted. Such a net- 
work, however, is too large to spread activity over 
it. Paradigme is the small and complete network for 
measuring the similarity. 
6.2 Connotation and Extension of Words 
The proposed similarity is based only on the deno- 
tational and intensional definitions in the dictionary 
LDOCE. Lack of the connotational and extensional 
knowledge causes some unexpected results of mea- 
suring the similarity. For example, consider the fol- 
lowing similarity: 
~(tree, leaf) = 0.008693. 
This is due to the nature of the dictionary defi- 
nitions- they only indicate sufficient conditions of 
the headword. For example, the definition of tree 
in LDOCE tells nothing about leaves: 
tree n 1 a tall plant with a wooden trunk and 
branches, that lives for many years 2 a bush 
or other plant with a treelike form 3 a drawing 
with a branching form, esp. as used for showing 
family relationships 
However, the definition is followed by pictures of 
leafy trees providing readers with connotational and 
extensional stereotypes of trees. 
6.3 Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic 
Similarity 
In the proposed method, the definitions in LDOCE 
are treated as word lists, though they are phrases 
with syntactic structures. Let us consider the fol- 
lowing definition of lift: 
llft v 1 to bring from a lower to a higher level; 
raise 2 (of movable parts) to be able to be 
lifted 3 --- 
Anyone can imagine that something is moving up- 
ward. But, such a movement can not be represented 
in the activated pattern produced from the phrase. 
The meaning of a phrase, sentence, or text should 
be represented as pattern changing in time, though 
what we need is static and paradigmatic relation. 
This paradox also arises in measuring the similar- 
ity between texts and the text coherence. As we have 
seen in Section 5, there is a difference between the 
similarity of texts and the similarity of word lists, 
and also between the coherence of a text and cohe- 
siveness of a word list. 
However, so far as the similarity between words 
is concerned, we assume that activated patterns on 
Paradigme will approximate the meaning of words, 
like a still picture can express a story. 
7 Conclusion 
We described measurement of semantic similarity be- 
tween words. The similarity between words is com- 
puted by spreading activation on the semantic net- 
work Paradigme which is systematically constructed 
from a subset of the English dictionary LDOCE. 
Paradigme can directly compute the similarity be- 
tween any two words in LDV, and indirectly the sim- 
ilarity of all the other words in LDOCE. 
The similarity between words provides a new 
method for analysing the structure of text. It can be 
applied to computing the similarity between texts, 
and measuring the cohesiveness of a text which sug- 
gests coherence of the text, as we have seen in Sec- 
tion 5. And, we are now applying it to text seg- 
mentation \[Grosz and Sidner, 1986; Youmans, 1991\], 
i.e. to capture the shifts of coherent scenes in a story. 
In future research, we intend to deal with syntag- 
matic relations between words. Meaning of a text lies 
in the texture of paradigmatic and syntagmatic re- 
lations between words \[Hjelmslev, 1943\]. Paradigme 
provides the former dimension -- an associative sys- 
tem of words -- as a screen onto which the meaning 
of a word is projected like a still picture. The latter 
dimension -- syntactic process -- will be treated as 
a film projected dynamically onto Paradigme. This 
enables us to measure the similarity between texts 
as a syntactic process, not as word lists. 
We regard Paradigme as a field for the interac- 
tion between text and episodes in memory -- the 
interaction between what one is hearing or reading 
and what one knows \[Schank, 1990\]. The meaning 
of words, sentences, or even texts can be projected 
in a uniform way on Paradigme, as we have seen in 
Section 4 and 5. Similarly, we can project text and 
episodes, and recall the most relevant episode for in- 
terpretation of the text. 
Appendix A. Structure of Paradigme 
w Mapping Gloss~me onto Paradigme 
The semantic network Paradigme is systematically 
constructed from the small and closed English dictio- 
nary Glossdme. Each entry of Gloss~me is mapped 
onto a node of Paradigme in the following way. (See 
also Figure 2 and 3.) 
Step 1. For each entry Gi in Glossdme, map 
each unit uij in Gi onto a subr6f~rant sij of the 
corresponding node Pi in Paradigme. Each word 
wij,, E uij is mapped onto a link or links in sij, in 
the following way: 
1. Let t, be the reciprocal of the number of ap- 
pearance of wij, (as its root form) in GIoss~me. 
2. If wij, is in a head-part, let t, be doubled. 
3. Find nodes {Pnl,P,~,"'} corresponds to wlj, 
(ex. red ~ {red_l, red_2}). Then, divide t, 
into {t,x,t,2,...} in proportion to their fre- 
quency. 
4. Add links l,l,l,2,.., to sij, where Into is a link 
to the node Pn,n with thickness t,,n. 
Thus, sij becomes a set of links: {lijl,lij2,...}, 
where iijk is a link with thickness tijk. Then, nor- 
238 
malise thickness of the links as ~"~k tlp, = 1, in each 
Step 2. For each node P/, compute thickness hij 
of each subr~f&ant sij in the following way: 
1. Let m/be the number of subr~f~rants of P/. 
2. Let hij be 2ml-1-j. 
(Note that hll : h/,n = 2 : 1.) 
3. Normalize thickness hij as ~"~j h/j = 1, in each 
P,. 
Step 3. Generate r~f~r6 of each node in 
Paradigme, in the following way: 
1. For each node P/in Paradigme, let its r~f~r~ ri 
be an empty set. 
2. For each P~, for each subr~f~rant sij of Pi, for 
each link lijk in sij: 
a. Let Pii~ be the node referred by i/i~, and let 
t~i~ be thickness of Ilia. 
b. Add a new link ! ~ to r~f~r~ of Pi~, where ! ~ is 
a link to P/with thickness t' = h~i .t~j~. 
3. Thus, each r~ becomes a set of links: 
{l'x, its,..-}, where 11i is a link with thickness 
t~-. Then, normalize thickness of the links as 
tij- 1, in each ri. 
Appendix B. Function of Paradigme 
Spreading Activation Rules 
Each node Pi of the semantic network Paradigme 
computes its activity value vi(T+ 1) at time T+I as 
follows: 
v'(T+ l) = ¢ ( R~(T) + R~(T) ) 2 + e~(T) , 
where R/(T) and R~(T) are activity (at time T) col- 
lected from the nodes referred in the r~f6rant and 
r~f~r~ respectively; q(T) E \[0, 1\] is activity given 
from outside (at time T); the output function ¢ 
limits the value to \[0,1\]. 
R/(T) is activity of the most plausible subr~fdrant 
in Pi, defined as follows: 
re(T) = S{m(T), 
m = argmaxj {hij .Sii(T)}, 
where hii is thickness of the j-th subr~f~rant of P{. 
Sii(T) is the sum of weighted activity of the nodes 
referred in the j-th subr~f~rant of P{, defined as fol- 
lows: 
S, i (T) = ~ tijk .a,jk (T), 
k 
where tljk is thickness of the k-th link of so. , and 
a~j~(T) is activity (at time T) of the node referred 
by the k-th link of sij. 
R\[(T) is weighted activity of the nodes referred in 
the r6f~r~ rl of P/: 
R~(T) = ~ t~t .a~k(T), 
where t~k is thickness of the/~-th link ofri, and a~k is 
activity (at time T) of the node referred by the k-th 
link of ri. 
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