A DISTANCE FUNCTION TO ASSESS THE SIMILARITY OF
Montserrat Batet, Aı̈da Valls, Karina Gibert · 2010
When comparing categorical values, traditional approaches use metrics based only on the matching of the values, obtaining a Boolean result. In this paper, it is proposed to use a measure able to compute the degree of semantic similarity between a pair of terms using an ontology as background knowledge. The presented measure - the Superconceptbased distance - have two main advantages over other approaches based on the exploitation of the hierarchical model of ontologies: on one hand, it takes into account the whole hierarchy of concepts in the ontology to assess the similarity between a pair of words; on the other hand, this paper proves that this measure fulfills the distance properties. As the paper also reviews, the usual semantic similarity measures used in the literature does not fulfill the triangle inequality, which prevents them from being used in some decision making methods.