A unified framework for semantic similarity computation of concepts

摘要

Semantic similarity assessment between concepts is an important task in many language related applications. In the past, many approaches to assess similarity of concepts have been proposed by using one knowledge source. In this paper, some limitations of the existing similarity measures are identified. To tackle these problems, we propose an extensive study for semantic similarity of concepts from which a unified framework for semantic similarity computation is presented. Based on our framework, we give some generic and flexible approaches to semantic similarity measures resulting from instantiations of the framework. In particular, we obtain some new approaches to similarity measures that existing methods cannot deal with by introducing multiple knowledge sources. The evaluation based on eight benchmarks, three widely used benchmarks (i.e., M&C, R&G, and WordSim-353 benchmarks) and five benchmarks developed in ourselves (i.e, Jiang-1, Jiang-2, Jiang-3, Jiang-4, and Jiang-5 benchmarks), sustains the intuitions with respect to human judgements. Overall, some methods proposed in this paper have a good human correlation (Pearson correlation with human judgments and Spearman correlation with human judgments) and constitute some effective ways of determining semantic similarity between concepts.