Semantic similarity or semantic relatedness is a concept whereby a set of documents or terms within term lists are assigned a metric based on the likeness of their meaning / semantic content.
Concretely, this can be achieved for instance by defining a topological similarity, by using ontologies to define a distance between words (a naive metric for terms arranged as nodes in a directed acyclic graph like a hierarchy would be the minimal distance—in separating edges—between the two term nodes), or using statistical means such as a vector space model to correlate words and textual contexts from a suitable text corpus (co-occurrence).
Read more about Semantic Similarity: Taxonomy, Visualisation, Software, Web Services
Famous quotes containing the words semantic and/or similarity:
“Watt’s need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)