Computing Semantic Clusters by Semantic Mirroring and Spectral Graph Partitioning

Using the technique of semantic mirroring a graph is obtained that represents words and their translations from a parallel corpus or a bilingual lexicon. The connectedness of the graph holds information about the semantic relations of words that occur in the translations. Spectral graph theory is used to partition the graph, which leads to a grouping of the words in different clusters. We illustrate the method using a small sample of seed words from a lexicon of Swedish and English adjectives and discuss its application to computational lexical semantics and lexicography.