Volume 10, Number 14, November 2020

A Topological Method for Comparing Document Semantics

  Authors

Yuqi Kong¹, Fanchao Meng¹ and Ben Carterette², ¹University of Delaware, USA, ²Spotify, USA

  Abstract

Comparing document semantics is one of the toughest tasks in both Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. To date, on one hand, the tools for this task are still rare. On the other hand, most relevant methods are devised from the statistic or the vector space model perspectives but nearly none from a topological perspective. In this paper, we hope to make a different sound. A novel algorithm based on topological persistence for comparing semantics similarity between two documents is proposed. Our experiments are conducted on a document dataset with human judges’ results. A collection of state-of-the-art methods are selected for comparison. The experimental results show that our algorithm can produce highly human-consistent results, and also beats most state-of-the-art methods though ties with NLTK.

  Keywords

Topological Graph, Document Semantics Comparison, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Topological Persistence.