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A hybrid approach for measuring semantic similarity based on IC-weighted path distance in WordNet

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Abstract

As a valuable tool for text understanding, semantic similarity measurement enables discriminative semantic-based applications in the fields of natural language processing, information retrieval, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. Most of the existing studies have used structured taxonomies such as WordNet to explore the lexical semantic relationship, however, the improvement of computation accuracy is still a challenge for them. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a hybrid WordNet-based approach CSSM-ICSP to measuring concept semantic similarity, which leverage the information content(IC) of concepts to weight the shortest path distance between concepts. To improve the performance of IC computation, we also develop a novel model of the intrinsic IC of concepts, where a variety of semantic properties involved in the structure of WordNet are taken into consideration. In addition, we summarize and classify the technical characteristics of previous WordNet-based approaches, as well as evaluate our approach against these approaches on various benchmarks. The experimental results of the proposed approaches are more correlated with human judgment of similarity in term of the correlation coefficient, which indicates that our IC model and similarity detection approach are comparable or even better for semantic similarity measurement as compared to others.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This study is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61502028), National Key Technology R&D Program of China (No. 2015BAK36B04), Training program foundation for the talents of Beijing (No.2015000020124G029), the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. 4172014) and the Research Foundation for Youth Scholars of Beijing Technology and Business University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Key Laboratory of Big Data Technology for Food Safety, School of Computer and Information Engineering, Beijing Technology and Business University, 100048, Beijing, China

    Yuanyuan Cai & Qingchuan Zhang

  2. School of Software Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, 100044, Beijing, China

    Wei Lu & Xiaoping Che

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  1. Yuanyuan Cai
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  2. Qingchuan Zhang
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Correspondence to Qingchuan Zhang.

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I certify that this manuscript is original and has not been published and will not be submitted elsewhere for publication while being considered by Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. And the study is not split up into several parts to increase the quantity of submissions and submitted to various journals or one journal over time. No data have been fabricated or manipulated (including images) to support our conclusions. No data, text, or theories by others are presented as if they were our own. The submission has been received explicitly from all co-authors. And authors whose names appear on the manuscript have contributed sufficiently to the scientific work and therefore share collective responsibility and accountability for the results. In addition, consent to submit has been received explicitly from all co-authors, as well as from the responsible authorities - tacitly or explicitly - at the institute where the work has been carried out, before the work is submitted. Authors are strongly advised to ensure the correct author group, corresponding author, and order of authors at submission.

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Funding

This study is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61502028), National Key Technology R&D Program of China (No.2015BAK36B04), Training program foundation for the talents of Beijing (No.2015000020124G029), the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. 4172014) and the Research Foundation for Youth Scholars of Beijing Technology and Business University.

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Cai, Y., Zhang, Q., Lu, W. et al. A hybrid approach for measuring semantic similarity based on IC-weighted path distance in WordNet. J Intell Inf Syst 51, 23–47 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-017-0479-y

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