Improving Word Similarity by Augmenting PMI with Estimates of Word Polysemy

Pointwise mutual information (PMI) is a widely used word similarity measure, but it lacks a clear explanation of how it works. We explore how PMI differs from distributional similarity, and we introduce a novel metric, PMI_max, that augments PMI with information about a word´s number of senses. The coefficients of PMI_max are determined empirically by maximizing a utility function based on the performance of automatic thesaurus generation. We show that it outperforms traditional PMI in the application of automatic thesaurus generation and in two word similarity benchmark tasks: human similarity ratings and TOEFL synonym questions. PMI_max achieves a correlation coefficient comparable to the best knowledge-based approaches on the Miller-Charles similarity rating data set.