UNITOR-CORE TYPED: Combining Text Similarity and Semantic Filters through SV Regression

This paper presents the UNITOR system that participated in the ∗SEM 2013 shared task on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS). The task is modeled as a Support Vector (SV) regression problem, where a similarity scoring function between text pairs is acquired from examples. The proposed approach has been implemented in a system that aims at providing high applicability and robustness, in order to reduce the risk of over-fitting over a specific datasets. Moreover, the approach does not require any manually coded resource (e.g. WordNet), but mainly exploits distributional analysis of unlabeled corpora. A good level of accuracy is achieved over the shared task: in the Typed STS task the proposed system ranks in 1st and 2nd position.