A generic framework and methodology for extracting semantics from co-occurrences

Extracting semantic associations from text corpora is an important problem with several applications. It is well understood that semantic associations from text can be discerned by observing patterns of co-occurrences of terms. However, much of the work in this direction has been piecemeal, addressing specific kinds of semantic associations. In this work, we propose a generic framework, using which several kinds of semantic associations can be mined. The framework comprises a co-occurrence graph of terms, along with a set of graph operators. A methodology for using this framework is also proposed, where the properties of a given semantic association can be hypothesized and tested over the framework. To show the generic nature of the proposed model, four different semantic associations are mined over a corpus comprising of Wikipedia articles. The design of the proposed framework is inspired from cognitive science — specifically the interplay between semantic and episodic memory in humans.