Measuring semantic relatedness between words using related synsets in African Wordnet

Abstract

Words should not be treated as if all they do is fulfil roles; they can also have relationships. In our everyday talk, we normally give the meanings of words in terms of their relationships. The approach for measuring semantic relatedness between words is determined by means of a set of words that are closely related to them, and these are normally referred to as the set of determiner words. This article examines the measures of semantic relatedness to which words are associated by means of the variety of types of semantic relationships – such as synonymy, hyponymy, function and association. This relationship is considered within the context of African Wordnet (AWN), which provides South African indigenous languages with a platform to access a machine-readable lexical database organised by meaning. This article argues that computing semantic relatedness using African Wordnet could be helpful in developing an understanding of the meaning of related words for use in different African languages.