Edge dependent pathway scoring for calculating semantic similarity in ConceptNet
Steve Spagnola, Carl Lagoze · 2011
Most techniques that calculate the relatedness between two concepts use a semantic network, such as Wikipedia, WordNet, or ConceptNet, to find the shortest intermediate pathway between two nodes. These techniques assume that a low number of edges on the shortest pathway indicates conceptual similarity. Although this technique has proven valid in conforming to psychological data, we test the usefulness of additional pathway variables in ConceptNet, such as edge type and user-rated score. Our results show strong evidence for the application of additional pathway variables in calculating semantic similarity. 1 ConceptNet Pathways ConceptNet 3 is one of the largest commonsense semantic networks in existence, relying on its users to make conceptual assertions and collectively vote on the legitimacy of other users ’ assertions. Concept-Net is valuable as a semantic resource because it suggests transitive inference between ideas, enabling dissimilar concepts to share a semantic, indirect relationship. Unlike Wikipedia and WordNet, the edges in ConceptNet contain additional semantic information between two concepts. Each edge is assigned a relation type (such as ”Is A ” or ”Located At”) and a score that correlates to how well ConceptNet users