Semantic comparison of texts by the metric approach

Abstract A novel approach to the semantic comparison of texts based on the metric method to calculate semantic distances between lexical units is put forward. The supplementary semantic information is provided through semes of the words composing the texts, or through their semantic fields. The proposed method takes into account semantic polarity and yields, for two paraphrase sentences, more feasible results than the conventional approaches based on word occurrences. The described approach may be useful for linguistic theory as well as for a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks based on supervised learning that require semantic information: computer lexicography, semantic analysis, information search and retrieval, document classification, text summarization, and understanding machine translation and others.