Explicit Semantic Analysis: Wikipedia-based Semantics for Natural Language Processing

Adequate representation of natural language semantics requires access to vast amounts of common sense and domain-specific world knowledge. In this talk I will present a novel method, called Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), for fine-grained semantic interpretation of unrestricted natural language texts. Our method represents meaning in a high-dimensional space of concepts derived from Wikipedia, or other large-scale human-built repositories. We show an automatic way for building and using such semantics. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on text analysis tasks such as text categorization, semantic relatedness, disambiguation, and information retrieval.

This is a joint work with Ofer Egozi, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Sonya Liberman and Ariel Raviv.