Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles - Sentence Similarity Computation Based on Wordnet and Corpus Statistics

Abstract

Measures of text similarity have been used for a long time in applications in natural language processing and related areas such as text mining, Web page retrieval, and dialogue systems. Existing methods for computing sentence similarity have been adopted from approaches used for long text documents. These methods process sentences in a very high-dimensional space and are consequently inefficient, require human input, and are not adaptable to some application domains. This paper presents a method for measuring the semantic similarity of texts, using corpus-based and knowledge-based measures of similarity. The semantic similarity of two sentences is calculated using information from a structured lexical database and from corpus statistics. The use of a lexical database enables our method to model human common sense knowledge and the incorporation of corpus statistics allows our method to be adaptable to different domains. The proposed method can be used in a variety of applications that involve text knowledge representation and discovery. Experiments on two sets of selected sentence pairs demonstrate that the proposed method provides a similarity measure that shows a significant correlation to human intuition.