What is Semantic Similarity? Definition of Semantic Similarity: A concept whereby a set of documents or terms within term lists are assigned a metric based on the likeness of their meaning/semantic content. ( Wikipedia, 2012e ).
Semantic similarity and relatedness measures assess how alike two words are within a language and are playing an important role in the development of the Semantic Web. This thesis research advances the knowledge of existing similarity and relatedness measures. A generalized tool to experiment with semantic similarity and relatedness measures in a variety of ontological terminologies has been developed using the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a proposed W3C standard for the Semantic Web. SKOS represents a terminology or domain vocabulary in a machine-understandable way. A flexible conversion tool is used to convert any vocabulary in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus and OWL ontologies into an extended SKOS ontological terminology. The generalized tool for measuring semantic similarity and relatedness is then used to analyze a wide variety of semantic similarity measures and new set-based relatedness measures on three major vocabularies of the UMLS Metathesaurus.
Semantic similarity, also called semantic relatedness or semantic closeness/proximity/nearness, is a concept whereby a set of documents or terms within term lists are assigned a metric based on the likeness of their meaning / semantic content.
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