Computing semantic relatedness from human navigational paths on Wikipedia

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for computing semantic relatedness between concepts on Wikipedia by using human navigational paths for this task. Our results suggest that human navigational paths provide a viable source for calculating semantic relatedness between concepts on Wikipedia. We also show that we can improve accuracy by intelligent selection of path corpora based on path characteristics indicating that not all paths are equally useful. Our work makes an argument for expanding the existing arsenal of data sources for calculating semantic relatedness and to consider the utility of human navigational paths for this task.