In this work we present SIFT, a 3-step algorithm for the analysis of the structural information represented by means of a taxonomy. The major advantage of this algorithm is the capability to leverage the information inherent to the hierarchical structures of taxonomies to infer correspondences which can allow to merge them in a later step. This method is particular relevant in scenarios where taxonomy alignment techniques exploiting textual information from taxonomy nodes cannot operate successfully.
Despite such advances in matching technologies, taxonomy alignments using linguistic information and other auxiliary information are rarely perfect @cite_17 . In particular, imperfection can be due to homonyms (i.e., nodes with identical concept-names, but possibly different semantics) and synonyms (concepts with different names but same semantics). However, the major advantage of pure structural matching techniques is that finding perfect alignments is possible in many cases.
@cite_17
1996675360
Computing the semantic similarity between terms (or short text expressions) that have the same meaning but which are not lexicographically similar is a key challenge in many computer related fields. The problem is that traditional approaches to semantic similarity measurement are not suitable for all situations, for example, many of them often fail to deal with terms not covered by synonym dictionaries or are not able to cope with acronyms, abbreviations, buzzwords, brand names, proper nouns, and so on. In this paper, we present and evaluate a collection of emerging techniques developed to avoid this problem. These techniques use some kinds of web intelligence to determine the degree of similarity between text expressions. These techniques implement a variety of paradigms including the study of co-occurrence, text snippet comparison, frequent pattern finding, or search log analysis. The goal is to substitute the traditional techniques where necessary.