Navigating the Semantic Horizon using Relative Neighborhood Graphs

This paper introduces a novel way to navigate neighborhoods in distributional semantic models. The approach is based on relative neighborhood graphs, which uncover the topological structure of local neighborhoods in semantic space. This has the potential to overcome both the problem with selecting a proper k in k-NN search, and the problem that a ranked list of neighbors may conflate several different senses. We provide both qualitative and quantitative results that support the viability of the proposed method.