Information Retrieval by Semantic Similarity

Abstract. Semantic Similarity relates to computing the similarity between conceptually similar but not necessarily lexically similar terms. Typically, semantic similarity is computed by mapping terms to an ontology and by examining their relationships in that ontology. We investigate approaches to computing the semantic similarity between natural language terms (using WordNet as the underlying reference ontology) and between medical terms (using the MeSH ontology of medical and biomedical terms). The most popular semantic similarity methods are implemented and evaluated using WordNet and MeSH. Building upon semantic similarity we propose the Semantic Similarity based Retrieval Model (SSRM), a novel information retrieval method capable for discovering similarities between documents containing conceptually similar terms. The most effective semantic similarity method is implemented into SSRM. SSRM has been applied in retrieval on OHSUMED (a standard TREC collection available on the Web). ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: IJSWIS
• Authors: Angelos Hliaoutakis, Giannis Varelas, Epimenidis Voutsakis, Euripides G. M. Petrakis, Evangelos E. Milios
• Keywords: IJSWIS 2006, Ontology, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Similarity Method