Jmp8 at SemEval-2017 Task 2: A simple and general distributional approach to estimate word similarity

Abstract

We have built a simple corpus-based system to estimate words similarity in multiple languages with a count-based approach. After training on Wikipedia corpora, our system was evaluated on the multilingual subtask of SemEval-2017 Task 2 and achieved a good level of performance, despite its great simplicity. Our results tend to demonstrate the power of the distributional approach in semantic similarity tasks, even without knowledge of the underlying language. We also show that dimensionality reduction has a considerable impact on the results.