A method for monolingual thesauri merging

Abstract

Thesauri merging is the activity of consolidating a set of thesauri into a thesaurus which accommodates the vocabularies and the structure of all thesauri being merged. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for monolingual thesauri merging. We also present a domain independent set-theoretic model for the representation of terms, relationships, and integrity constraints. Finally, we presenta method for the merging of monolingual thesauri focusing on its mechemisms for the detection of equivalent terms among the thesauri being merged. Our method expands previous work on the problem; we introduce equivalence asaumpt ions that express similarity between terms and we propose a term distance model which can be used to guide the confirmation or rejection of equivalence assumptions.