Skip to main content

A Tree-Based Similarity for Evaluating Concept Proximities in an Ontology

  • Conference paper
Data Science and Classification

Abstract

The problem of evaluating semantic similarity in a network structure knows a noticeable renewal of interest linked to the importance of the ontologies in the semantic Web. Different semantic measures have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the strength of the semantic link between two concepts or two groups of concepts within either two different ontologies or the same ontology. This paper presents a theoretical study synthesis of some semantic measures based on an ontology restricted to subsumption links. We outline some limitations of these measures and introduce a new one: the Proportion of Shared Specificity. This measure which does not depend on an external corpus, takes into account the density of links in the graph between two concepts. A numerical comparison of the different measures has been made on different large size samples from WordNet.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • BECHHOFER, S., VAN HARMELEN, F., HENDLER, J., HORROCKS, I., MCGUINNESS, D. L., PATEL-SCHNEIDER, P. F., AND STEIN, L. A. (2004): Owl web ontology language reference. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-ref-20040210/.

    Google Scholar 

  • BERIO, G. AND HARZALLAH, M. (2005): Knowledge management for competence management. Universal Knowledge Management, 0.

    Google Scholar 

  • BUDANITSKY, A. (1999): Lexical semantic relatedness and its application in natural language processing. Technical report, Computer Systems Research Group — University of Toronto.

    Google Scholar 

  • FELLBAUM, C., editor (1998): WordNet: An electronic lexical database. MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • GANESAN, P., GARCIA-MOLINA, H., AND WIDOM, J. (2003): Exploiting hierarchical domain structure to compute similarity. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 21(1):64–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • GRUBER, T. R. (1993): A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2):199–220.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • GUARINO, N. (1995): Formal ontology, conceptual analysis and knowledge representation. Human-Computer Studies, 43(5/6):625–640.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • JIANG, J. J. AND CONRATH, D. W. (1997): Semantic similarity based on corpus statistics and lexical taxonomy. In Proc. of Int. Conf. on Research in Comp. Linguistics.

    Google Scholar 

  • LAUKKANEN, M. AND HELIN, H. (2005): Competence management within and between organizations. In Proc. of 2nd Interop-EMOI Workshop on Enterprise Models and Ontologies for Interoperability at the 17th Conf. on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, pages 359–362. Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • LEACOCK, C. AND CHODOROW, M. (1998): Combining local context and word-net similarity for word sense identification. In Fellbaum, C., editor, WordNet: An electronic lexical database, pages 265–283. MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • LIN, D. (1998): An information-theoretic definition of similarity. In Proc. of the 15th Int. Conf. on Machine Learning, pages 296–304. Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • MAGUITMAN, A. G., MENCZER, F., ROINESTAD, H., AND VESPIGNANI, A. (2005): Algorithmic detection of semantic similarity. In Proc. of the 14th int. conf. on World Wide Web, pages 107–116. ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • PEDERSEN, T., PATWARDHAN, S., AND MICHELIZZI, J. (2004): Wordnet:: similarity — measuring the relatedness of concepts. In Proc. of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Comp. Linguistics, pages 38–41.

    Google Scholar 

  • RADA, R., MILI, H., BICKNELL, E., AND BLETTNER, M. (1989): Development and application of a metric on semantic nets. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 19(1):17–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • RESNIK, P. (1995): Using information content to evaluate semantic similarity in a taxonomy. In Proc. of the 14th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, volume 1, pages 448–453.

    Google Scholar 

  • ROSCH, E. (1975): Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1:303–322.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • SALTON, G. AND MCGILL, M. J. (1983): Introduction to modern information retrieval. McGraw-Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • SUSSNA, M. (1993): Word sense disambiguation for free-text indexing using a massive semantic network. In Proc. of the Sec. Int. Conf. on Information and Knowledge Management, pages 67–74.

    Google Scholar 

  • TVERSKY, A. (1977): Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84(4):327–352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Blanchard, E., Kuntz, P., Harzallah, M., Briand, H. (2006). A Tree-Based Similarity for Evaluating Concept Proximities in an Ontology. In: Batagelj, V., Bock, HH., Ferligoj, A., Žiberna, A. (eds) Data Science and Classification. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-34416-0_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics