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International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems

IEA/AIE 2010: Trends in Applied Intelligent Systems pp 274–283Cite as

Exploiting Taxonomical Knowledge to Compute Semantic Similarity: An Evaluation in the Biomedical Domain

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6096))

Abstract

Determining the semantic similarity between concept pairs is an important task in many language related problems. In the biomedical field, several approaches to assess the semantic similarity between concepts by exploiting the knowledge provided by a domain ontology have been proposed. In this paper, some of those approaches are studied, exploiting the taxonomical structure of a biomedical ontology (SNOMED-CT). Then, a new measure is presented based on computing the amount of overlapping and non-overlapping taxonomical knowledge between concept pairs. The performance of our proposal is compared against related ones using a set of standard benchmarks of manually ranked terms. The correlation between the results obtained by the computerized approaches and the manual ranking shows that our proposal clearly outperforms previous works.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition Research Group, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Països Catalans 26, E-43007, Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain

    Montserrat Batet, David Sanchez & Aida Valls

  2. Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning group, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord, Ed.C5, c/Jordi Girona 1-3, E-08034, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Karina Gibert

Authors
  1. Montserrat Batet
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  2. David Sanchez
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  3. Aida Valls
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  4. Karina Gibert
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computing and Numerical Analysis, University of Cordoba, Campus Universitario de Rabanales, Einstein Building, 3rd floor, 14071, Cordoba, Spain

    Nicolás García-Pedrajas

  2. Dept. of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, ETS de Ingenierias Informática y de Telecomunicación, University of Granada, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Francisco Herrera

  3. School of Computing, University of the West of Scotland, PA1 2BE, Paisley, UK

    Colin Fyfe

  4. Dept. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, ETS de Ingenierias Informática y de Telecomunicación, University of Granada, 18071, Granada, Spain

    José Manuel Benítez

  5. Department of Computer Science, Texas State University-San Marcos, 601 University Drive, TX 78666-4616, San Marcos, USA

    Moonis Ali

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Batet, M., Sanchez, D., Valls, A., Gibert, K. (2010). Exploiting Taxonomical Knowledge to Compute Semantic Similarity: An Evaluation in the Biomedical Domain. In: García-Pedrajas, N., Herrera, F., Fyfe, C., Benítez, J.M., Ali, M. (eds) Trends in Applied Intelligent Systems. IEA/AIE 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6096. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13022-9_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13022-9_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13021-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13022-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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