A Fuzzy Word Similarity Measure for Selecting Top-k Similar Words in Query Expansion

Top-$ k$ words selection is a technique used to detect and return the $ k$ most similar words to a given word from a candidate set. This is a crucial and widely used tool in various tasks. The key issue in top-$k$ words selection is how to measure the similarity between words. One popular and effective solution is to use a word embedding-based similarity measure, which represents words as low-dimensional vectors and measures the similarities between words according to the similarity of the vectors, using a metric. However, most word embedding methods only consider the local proximity properties of two words in a corpus. To mitigate this issue. In this article, we propose to use association rules for measuring word similarity at a global level, and a fuzzy similarity measure for top-k words selection that jointly encodes the local and the global similarities. Experiments on a real-world query task with three benchmark datasets, i.e., TREC-disk 4&5, WT10G, and RCV1, demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method compared to several state-of-the-art baselines.