Computing Semantic Relatedness using Wikipedia Taxonomy by Spreading Activation

Abstract

Semantic relatedness means the degree of the nearness of two documents or two terms based on the sameness of their meaning or semantic contents. A method for computing semantic relatedness is crucial in the web mining applications such as search engine, recommendation systems and information retrieval systems, and also in the area of natural language processing. This paper proposes a new technique for measuring semantic relatedness between two terms. It uses Wikipedia as a source of structured world knowledge about the terms of interest while ontologies are used to retrieve the semantically related information in most systems. The proposed method used spreading activation approach over the taxonomy of Wikipedia categories to get the measures of semantic relatedness. Spreading activation strategy is a popular approach in associative retrieval. The proposed method is experienced with the benchmark dataset to show the comparison our approach with some existing approaches.