Short Text Semantic Similarity Measurement Approach Based on Semantic Network

Abstract

Estimating the semantic similarity between short texts plays an increasingly prominent role in many fields related to text mining and natural language processing applications, especially with the large increase in the volume of textual data that is produced daily. Traditional approaches for calculating the degree of similarity between two texts, based on the words they share, do not perform well with short texts because two similar texts may be written in different terms by employing synonyms. As a result, short texts should be semantically compared. In this paper, a semantic similarity measurement method between texts is presented which combines knowledge-based and corpus-based semantic information to build a semantic network that represents the relationship between the compared texts and extracts the degree of similarity between them. Representing a text as a semantic network is the best knowledge representation that comes close to the human mind's understanding of the texts, where the semantic network reflects the sentence's semantic, syntactical, and structural knowledge. The network representation is a visual representation of knowledge objects, their qualities, and their relationships. WordNet lexical database has been used as a knowledge-based source while the GloVe pre-trained word embedding vectors have been used as a corpus-based source. The proposed method was tested using three different datasets, DSCS, SICK, and MOHLER datasets. A good result has been obtained in terms of RMSE and MAE.