I am working on a natural language processing project in Java. I have a requirement where I want to identify words that belong to similar semantic groups.
e.g. : if the words such as study , university, graduate , attend are found I want them to be categorized as being related to education.
If words such as golfer, batsman, athlete are found, it should categorize all under a parent like sportsperson.
Is there a way I can achieve this task without using and training approach. Is there some toll like WordNet that can be used directly? Any pointer would be greatly appreciated!
Thanx cheers!! :-)
Yes, you can use WordNet. For example, you can search among hypernyms of the current word (e.g. study) for your category word (e.g. education or sport). There are JAWS, JWNL, and other libraries, see related question.
Alternatively, you can compute similarity between candidate words and category words - e.g. by using ws4j or Semilar.