Nothing like Good Old Frequency: Studying Context Filters for Distributional Thesauri

Muntsa Padró, Marco Idiart, Aline Villavicencio, Carlos Ramisch

Abstract: Much attention has been given to the impact of informativeness and similarity measures on distributional thesauri. We investigate the effects of context filters on thesaurus quality and propose the use of cooccurrence frequency as a simple and inexpensive criterion. For evaluation, we measure thesaurus agreement with WordNet and performance in answering TOEFL-like questions. Results illustrate the sensitivity of distributional thesauri to filters.