Measuring similarity and relatedness using multiple semantic relations in WordNet

Semantic similarity and relatedness computation has attracted an increasing amount of attention among researchers. The majority of previous studies, including edge-based and information content-based methods, rely on a single semantic relationship in WordNet such as the “is-a” relation. However, a performance ceiling may have been created by semantic unicity and inadequate calculation in solely “is-a” relation-based measurements, i.e., the computed results for some word pairs are too small and significantly deviate from human judgments. For this problem, we propose the following solutions: (1) We introduce the notion of the nearest common descendant to provide a supplement for commonalities between concepts according to genetics theory. (2) We design various targeted methods for different incomplete semantic relations. Therefore, various semantic relations can participate in similarity and relatedness computations in their most appropriate manners. (3) We utilize the cross-use of incomplete semantic relations similar-to and antonymy to solve the challenge of adjective and adverb similarity/relatedness measurements in WordNet. (4) We propose a targeted independent computation and largest contribution aggregation method to break through the performance ceiling of similarity/relatedness measurements based on single “is-a” relations. We conduct evaluations of our proposed model using seven extensively employed datasets. These evaluations indicate that our method significantly improves the performance of the existing methods based on single “is-a” relations. Their best Pearson coefficient with human judgments on both the MC30 and RG65 is increased to 0.9. With the development and enrichment of semantic relations in WordNet, our proposed model can be expected to have a more prominent role.