A semantic vector space model using Euclidean distance based relatedness

In this thesis, it is aimed to develop an efficient method to measure the semantic relatedness of the words. Although computer-based studies have achieved good results on this subject for nearly three decades, they have not succeeded to produce relatedness measurement close to human intuition. In this study, a WordNet-based approach is preferred, because WordNet has a graph adapted model. In addition, it is inspired by the so-called word embedding model, which is based on the dense representation of word prototypes in the low-dimensional vector space. Through proposed model, randomly positioned word prototypes are located into appropriate positions in multidimensional vector space with help of iterative learning algorithm that optimizes WordNet relation weights and word prototype positions that use Euclidean distance based relatedness. Both the positions of the words in the vector space and the weight of the semantic relations that connect the words on WordNet are determined effectively through the proposed model. The results obtained in the benchmark tests show that the new proposed model produces more successful results than the previous word-level semantic similarity studies. This approach might present a different perspective not only on semantic similarity studies but also on solving many other natural language problems.