Semantic Relatedness

Large number of semantic relatedness measures have been presented since the last decades.  In spite of an extensive number of studies that have been conducted in this field, the understanding of their foundation is still limited in real world applications. In this paper, the state-of-the-art semantic relatedness measures are surveyed and in the following a unified topic-based models is proposed to highlight their equivalences and propose bridges between their theoretical bases. Presentation of a comprehensive unified approach of topic based models induces readers to have common understanding of them in spite of the complexities and differences between their architecture and configuration details. Moreover, it may underlie fundamental development of these models. Comprehensive experiments in application of semantic relatedness of geographic phrases have been conducted to evaluate topic based models in comparison to ontology-based models. Based on the obtained results, not only topic-based models in comparison to ontology-based models confront with fewer restrictions in real world, but also their performance in computing semantic relatedness of geographic phrases is significantly superior to ontology-based models. 

The current study presents an alternative approach toward semantic relatedness research in second/foreign language (L2) education as it looks at the issue from a cognitive perspective. The participants were 35 intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A semantic priming experiment was used to examine the cognitive processing of semantically related and semantically unrelated words. Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on reaction time and error rate data to establish any potential interaction between the primes and targets with reference to their semantic relatedness. The results showed that semantic relatedness does exercise a noteworthy influence on the ease of cognitive processing of L2 words. This facilitative effect is reflected in faster responses and lower errors on the part of the EFL learners when they dealt with semantically related words in comparison to semantically unrelated words, and can be attributed to the core mechanism of activation of lexical items in the human mind.