Measures to Calculate Semantic Similarity: A Survey
Semantic similarity is a metric used to measure extent of similarity of meaning between two concepts. The concepts can be two words, sentences, or paragraphs. It tries to find the distance between two concepts in the semantic space, lesser the distance greater the similarity. Semantic similarity techniques compute similarity between two concepts which are lexicographically different. The methods used to find semantic similarity between two words can be extended to find similarity between sentences, phrases, or paragraphs. Finding semantic similarity between two concepts has many practical applications. It plays increasingly important role in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), Text Mining, etc. Text similarity techniques can be effectively employed for tasks such as text summarization [14], text classification [15], redundancy removal, document retrieval [16], question generation, question answering [17], etc. Effectiveness of these tasks can be immensely improved if semantic similarity measures are used to determine text similarity. Keywords-Semantic similarity, Text similarity, Corpus-based Methods, Knowledge-based Methods, Semantic Relatedness