How to calculate the distance in meaning of two words in Python

Question

I am wondering if it's possible to calculate the distance/similarity between two related words in Python (like "fraud" and "steal"). These two words are not synonymous per se but they are clearly related. Are there any concepts/algorithms in NLP that can show this relationship numerically? Maybe via NLTK?

I'm not looking for the Levenshtein distance as that relates to the individual characters that make up a word. I'm looking for how the meaning relates.

Would appreciate any help provided.

Answer 1

My suggestion is as follows:

• Put each word through the same thesaurus, to get a list of synonyms.
• Get the size of the set of similar synonyms for the two words.
• That is a measure of similarity between the words.

If you would like to do a more thorough analysis:

• Also get the antonyms for each of the two words.
• Get the size of the intersection of the sets of antonyms for the two words.

If you would like to go further!...

• Put each word through the same thesaurus, to get a list of synonyms.
• Use the top n (=5, or whatever) words from the query result to initiate a new query.
• Repeat this to a depth you feel is adequate.
• Make a collection of synonyms from the repeated synonym queries.
• Get the size of the set of similar synonyms for the two words from the two collections of synonyms.
• That is a measure of similarity between the words.