An Efficient Approach for Measuring Semantic Similarity Combining WordNet and Wikipedia

Abstract

The measurement of semantic similarity between concepts is an important research topic in natural language processing. In the past, several approaches for measuring the semantic similarity between concepts have been proposed based on WordNet or Wikipedia. However, improvements in the measurement accuracy of most methods have led to a dramatic increase in time complexity, and the existing methods do not effectively integrate WordNet and Wikipedia. In this paper, we focus on designing an efficient semantic similarity method based on WordNet and Wikipedia. To improve the accuracy of WordNet edge-based measures, we propose an edge weight model for combining edge and density information, which assigns a weight to each edge adaptively based on the number of direct hyponyms of the subsumer. Second, to improve the computational efficiencies of the existing Wikipedia link vector-based measures, we propose a new Wikipedia link feature-based semantic similarity method that converts Wikipedia links into semantic knowledge and replaces the TF-IDF statistical weight model in the existing measures. In addition, we propose two new word disambiguation strategies to further improve the accuracy of Wikipedia link-based measures. Finally, to fully exploit the advantages of WordNet and Wikipedia, we propose two new aggregation schemas for combining WordNet “is-a” semantics and Wikipedia link semantics to replace the current aggregation schemas that combine WordNet “is-a” semantics with category semantics in Wikipedia. The experimental results show that our aggregation models are outstanding in terms of accuracy, efficiency and word coverage compared to state-of-the-art similarity measures.

Keywords

• Semantic similarity
• edge weight model
• word disambiguation strategy
• WordNet
• Wikipedia