A Thesaurus Construction Method from Large ScaleWeb Dictionaries

Web-based dictionaries, such as Wikipedia, have become dramatically popular among the Internet users in past several years. The important characteristic of Web-based dictionary is not only the huge amount of articles, but also hyperlinks. Hyperlinks have various information more than just providing transfer function between pages. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to analyze the link structure of Web-based dictionaries to construct an association thesaurus. We have already applied it to Wikipedia, a huge scale Web-based dictionary which has a dense link structure, as a corpus. We developed a search engine for evaluation, then conducted a number of experiments to compare our method with other traditional methods such as cooccurrence analysis.