This paper presents a new measure of semantic similarity in an IS-A taxonomy, based on the notion of information content. Experimental evaluation suggests that the measure performs encouragingly well (a correlation of r = 0.79 with a benchmark set of human similarity judgments, with an upper bound of r = 0.90 for human subjects performing the same task), and significantly better than the traditional edge counting approach (r = 0.66).
The literature on corpus-based determination of word similarity has recently been growing by leaps and bounds, and is too extensive to discuss in detail here (for a review, see @cite_1 ), but most approaches to the problem share a common assumption: semantically similar words have similar distributional behavior in a corpus. Using this assumption, it is common to treat the words that co-occur near a word as constituting features, and to compute word similarity in terms of how similar their feature sets are. As in information retrieval, the feature'' representation of a word often takes the form of a vector, with the similarity computation amounting to a computation of distance in a highly multidimensional space. Given a distance measure, it is not uncommon to derive word classes by hierarchical clustering. A difficulty with most distributional methods, however, is how the measure of similarity (or distance) is to be interpreted. Although word classes resulting from distributional clustering are often described as semantic,'' they often capture syntactic, pragmatic, or stylistic factors as well.
@cite_1
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Determining semantic similarity between texts is important in many tasks in information retrieval such as search, query suggestion, automatic summarization and image finding. Many approaches have been suggested, based on lexical matching, handcrafted patterns, syntactic parse trees, external sources of structured semantic knowledge and distributional semantics. However, lexical features, like string matching, do not capture semantic similarity beyond a trivial level. Furthermore, handcrafted patterns and external sources of structured semantic knowledge cannot be assumed to be available in all circumstances and for all domains. Lastly, approaches depending on parse trees are restricted to syntactically well-formed texts, typically of one sentence in length. We investigate whether determining short text similarity is possible using only semantic features---where by semantic we mean, pertaining to a representation of meaning---rather than relying on similarity in lexical or syntactic representations. We use word embeddings, vector representations of terms, computed from unlabelled data, that represent terms in a semantic space in which proximity of vectors can be interpreted as semantic similarity. We propose to go from word-level to text-level semantics by combining insights from methods based on external sources of semantic knowledge with word embeddings. A novel feature of our approach is that an arbitrary number of word embedding sets can be incorporated. We derive multiple types of meta-features from the comparison of the word vectors for short text pairs, and from the vector means of their respective word embeddings. The features representing labelled short text pairs are used to t