Resolving quasi-synonym relationships in automatic thesaurus construction using fuzzy rough sets and an inverse term frequency similarity function

One of the problems associated with automatic thesaurus construction is with determining the semantic relationship between word pairs. Quasi-synonyms provide a type of equivalence relationship: words are similar only for purposes of information retrieval. Determining such relationships in a thesaurus is hard to achieve automatically. The term vector space model and an inverse term frequency similarity function can provide a way to automatically determine the similarity between words in thesaurus. A thesaurus constructed using this method can also improve precision and recall in information retrieval, when the thesaurus is constructed in conjunction with fuzzy rough set algorithms and used with tight upper approximation query expansion. This dissertation presents a method that combines fuzzy rough sets and a word weighting and inverse term frequency similarity function as a technique for automatic thesaurus construction.