Building a network of topical relations from a corpus

Abstract

Lexical networks such as WordNet are known to have a lack of topical relations although these relations are very useful for tasks such as text summarization or information extraction. In this article, we present a method for automatically building from a large corpus a lexical network whose relations are preferably topical ones. As it does not rely on resources such as dictionaries, this method is based on self-bootstrapping: a network of lexical cooccurrences is first built from a corpus and then, is filtered by using the words of the corpus that are selected by the initial network. We report an evaluation about topic segmentation showing that the results got with the filtered network are the same as the results got with the initial network although the first one is significantly smaller than the second one.

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