Toward simulating the human way of comparing concepts

Abstract

An ability to assess similarity lies close to the core of cognition. Its understanding support the comprehension of human success in tasks like problem solving, categorization, memory retrieval, inductive reasoning, etc, and this is the main reason that it is a common research topic. In this paper, we introduce the idea of semantic differences and commonalities between words to the similarity computation process. Five new semantic similarity metrics are obtained after applying this scheme to traditional WordNet-based measures. We also combine the node based similarity measures with a corpus-independent way of computing the information content. In an experimental evaluation of our approach on two standard word pairs datasets, four of the measures outperformed their classical version, while the other performed as well as their unmodified counterparts. Copyright © 2011 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.