Semantic Similarity Methods in WordNet and their Application to Information Retrieval on the Web

TitleSemantic Similarity Methods in WordNet and their Application to Information Retrieval on the Web
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2005
AuthorsVarelas G, Voutsakis E, Raftopoulou P, Petrakis E.G.M., Milios E
Conference NameProceedings of 7th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM)
Date PublishedNovember
PublisherACM
Conference LocationBremen, Germany
KeywordsInformation retrieval, Semantic Similarity, WordNet, World Wide Web
AbstractSemantic Similarity relates to computing the similarity be- tween concepts which are not lexicographically similar. We investigate approaches to computing semantic similarity by mapping terms (concepts) to an ontology and by examining their relationships in that ontology. Some of the most popular semantic similarity methods are implemented and evaluated using WordNet as the underlying reference ontology. Building upon the idea of semantic similarity, a novel information retrieval method is also proposed. This method is capable of detecting similarities between documents containing semantically similar but not necessarily lexicographically similar terms. The proposed method has been evaluated in retrieval of images and documents on the Web. The experimental results demonstrated very promising performance improvements over state-of-the-art information retrieval methods.