Evaluation of automatic updates of Roget’s Thesaurus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thesauri and similarly organised resources attract increasing interest of Natural Language Processing researchers. Thesauri age fast, so there is a constant need to update their vocabulary. Since a manual update cycle takes considerable time, automated methods are required. This work presents a tuneable method of measuring semantic relatedness, trained on Roget’s Thesaurus, which generates lists of terms related to words not yet in the Thesaurus. Using these lists of terms, we experiment with three methods of adding words to the Thesaurus. We add, with high confidence, over 5500 and 9600 new words and word senses to versions of Roget’s Thesaurus from 1911 and 1987 respectively. We evaluate our work both manually, and by applying the updated thesauri in three NLP tasks: selection of the best synonym from a set of candidates, pseudo-word-sense disambiguation, and SAT-style analogy problems. We find that the newly added words are of high quality. The additions significantly improve the performance of Roget’s-based methods in these NLP tasks. It compares favourably to the performance of WordNet-based methods. Our methods are general enough to work with different versions of Roget’s Thesaurus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.079 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".