Domain-specific semantic relatedness from wikipedia structure: A case study in biomedical text

Abstract

Wikipedia is becoming an important knowledge source in various domain specific applications based on concept representation. This introduces the need for concrete evaluation of Wikipedia as a foundation for computing semantic relatedness between concepts. While lexical resources like WordNet cover generic English well, they are weak in their coverage of domain specific terms and named entities, which is one of the strengths of Wikipedia. Furthermore, semantic relatedness methods that rely on the hierarchical structure of a lexical resource are not directly applicable to the Wikipedia link structure, which is not hierarchical and whose links do not capture well defined semantic relationships like hyponymy. In this paper we (1) Evaluate Wikipedia in a domain specific semantic relatedness task and demonstrate that Wikipedia based methods can be competitive with state of the art ontology based methods and distributional methods in the biomedical domain (2) Adapt and evaluate the effectiveness of bibliometric methods of various degrees of sophistication on Wikipedia (3) Propose a new graph-based method for calculating semantic relatedness that outperforms existing methods by considering some specific features of Wikipedia structure.