Mining for meaning. The extraction of lexico-semanticknowledge from text
PhD ceremony: Mr. T. van de Cruys, 14.45 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen
Thesis: Mining for meaning. The extraction of lexico-semanticknowledge from text
Promotor(s): prof. J. Nerbonne
Faculty: Arts
Words have a particular meaning. While language users have no problems inferring those meanings, this is a hard task for a computer system. In his dissertation, Tim van de Cruys investigates how a computer might be able to infer the meaning of words automatically from large text collections. The basic approach for doing so is by comparing the contexts of words (such as the surrounding words, or the syntactic relations in which the word takes part), in order to determine how similar those contexts are. This information enables a computer to automatically extract groups of words from text that are similar to each other.
An important part of the research focuses on dimensionality reduction, and its application to language. The use of large text collections brings about a large number of contexts in which a word occurs. Using a mathematical dimensionality reduction, the abundance of individual contexts can be reduced to a limited number of significant dimensions. Characteristic for these dimensions is that they contain `latent semantics': the value of a word on a particular dimension indicates the score of the word for a particular semantic field (such as economics, transport, food, ...). The research shows that, with a number of simple algorithms, the meaning of words can automatically be extracted from text, and this is an important step towards a system that is able to understand what is written in texts.
Last modified: | 13 March 2020 01.15 a.m. |
More news
-
06 June 2025
India-Netherlands Hydrogen Valley Fellowship Programme announced
To coincide with World Environment Day, 5 June 2025, the Indian Department of Science and Technology and the University of Groningen yesterday announced a Hydrogen Valley Fellowship Programme Partnership, allowing talented Indian scholars working on...
-
13 May 2025
European security: opportunity and threat to democracy
How strong is our democracy? This will be determined by what is currently happening on the world stage, argues Pieter de Wilde, Professor of European Politics & Society at the University of Groningen.
-
08 May 2025
Prof. Petra Hendriks elected member Academia Europaea
Prof. Petra Hendriks, professor of Semantics and Cognition at the Faculty of Arts and director of the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG), has been elected a member of the prestigious Academia Europaea.