Semantic Similarity of Product and Service Names in Portuguese

Abstract

The problem of conceptual comparison of names plays an important role in the field of natural language processing. In this task, the goal is to choose, among a set of names, which one refers to the same concept or object as a given input name. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for comparing names of products and services in Portuguese that takes account of the semantic information contained in the names. The semantic similarity between two names is calculated using information from Onto.PT, the largest public lexical ontology for the Portuguese language. Experiments were conducted on a dataset composed of 5,000 pairs of names of products and services in Portuguese. Our experimental results show that the algorithm based on Onto.PT is more effective than other well-known algorithms for name comparison, producing the highest recall and precision. Moreover, results also provide interesting insights into the advantages and disadvantages of using Onto.PT for assessing the semantic similarity of names and other kinds of short texts.

Keywords

• Semantic Similarity
• Portuguese
• Ontology
• Short Text
• Onto.PT