Measuring Meaning on the World-Wide Web

Abstract

We introduce the notion of the 'meaning bound' of a word with respect to another word by making use of the World-Wide Web as a conceptual environment for meaning. The meaning of a word with respect to another word is established by multiplying the product of the number of webpages containing both words by the total number of webpages of the World-Wide Web, and dividing the result by the product of the number of webpages for each of the single words. We calculate the meaning bounds for several words and analyze different aspects of these by looking at specific examples.