Concept similarity in formal concept analysis: An information content approach

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is revealing interesting in supporting difficult activities that are becoming fundamental in the development of the Semantic Web. Assessing concept similarity is one of such activities since it allows the identification of different concepts that are semantically close. In this paper, a method for measuring the similarity of FCA concepts is presented, which is a refinement of a previous proposal of the author. The refinement consists in determining the similarity of concept descriptors (attributes) by using the information content approach, rather than relying on human domain expertise. The information content approach which has been adopted allows a higher correlation with human judgement than other proposals for evaluating concept similarity in a taxonomy defined in the literature. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.