The WordSimilarity-353 Test Collection contains two sets of
English word pairs along with human-assigned similarity judgements.
The collection can be used to train and/or test computer algorithms
implementing semantic similarity measures (i.e., algorithms that numerically
estimate similarity of natural language words).
The first set (set1) contains 153 word pairs along with their similarity
scores assigned by 13 subjects. The second set (set2) contains 200 word pairs,
with their similarity assessed by 16 subjects. Subjects' names have been replaced
by ordinal numbers (1..13, or 1..16) to protect their privacy; identical numbers in
the two sets do not necessarily correspond to the same individual.
All the subjects in both experiments possessed near-native command of English.
Their instructions were to estimate the relatedness of the words in pairs
on a scale from 0 (totally unrelated words) to 10 (very much related or identical
words). The precise instructions are available in file instructions.txt
inside the ZIP archive (see section "Availability and usage" below).
Each set provides the raw scores assigned by each subject, as well as the mean score
for each word pair. For convenience, a combined set (combined) is provided
that contains a list of all 353 words, along with their mean similarity scores.
The combined set is merely a concatenation of the two smaller sets.
All sets (set1, set2 and combined) are available in two formats:
Comma-separated values (CSV) - see files with the csv extension
Tab-delimited (TAB) - see files with the tab extension
The first two columns in each file contain word pairs, followed by a column with the
(floating-point) mean score of the subjects' individual assessments. In set1
and set2 there are additional columns with individual subjects' scores
(one column per subject). In the general case, all scores are floating-point,
although many appear as integers.
Note:set1 includes, among others, all the 30 noun pairs
from G.A. Miller and W.G. Charles, "Contextual correlates of semantic
similarity", Language and Cognitive Processes, Vol. 6, No. 1,
1991, pp. 1-28 (although similarity scores have been obtained anew).
If you publish results based on this data set, please cite as
Lev Finkelstein, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Yossi Matias, Ehud Rivlin, Zach Solan,
Gadi Wolfman, and Eytan Ruppin, "Placing Search in Context: The Concept Revisited", ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 20(1):116-131,
January 2002 [Abstract /
Eneko Agirre, Enrique Alfonseca, Keith Hall, Jana Kravalova, Marius Pasca, Aitor Soroa A Study on Similarity and Relatedness Using Distributional and WordNet-based Approaches,
Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2009.