Using lexical and relational similarity to classify semantic relations

Many methods are available for computing semantic similarity between individual words, but certain NLP tasks require the comparison of word pairs. This paper presents a kernel-based framework for application to relational reasoning tasks of this kind. The model presented here combines information about two distinct types of word pair similarity: lexical similarity and relational similarity. We present an efficient and flexible technique for implementing relational similarity and show the effectiveness of combining lexical and relational models by demonstrating state-of-the-art results on a compound noun interpretation task.