Using Information Content to Evaluate Semantic Similarity in a Taxonomy

Philip Resnik

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arXiv · cmp-lg/9511007

Using Information Content to Evaluate Semantic Similarity in a Taxonomy

Philip Resnik

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Abstract

This paper presents a new measure of semantic similarity in an IS-A taxonomy, based on the notion of information content. Experimental evaluation suggests that the measure performs encouragingly well (a correlation of r = 0.79 with a benchmark set of human similarity judgments, with an upper bound of r = 0.90 for human subjects performing the same task), and significantly better than the traditional edge counting approach (r = 0.66).

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Philip Resnik. 1995-11-29. Using Information Content to Evaluate Semantic Similarity in a Taxonomy. https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9511007

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