Semantic Similarity in a Taxonomy: An Information-Based Measure and its Application to Problems of Ambiguity in Natural Language. Philip Resnik. JAIR 1999

• Key Ideas
• Comments
• Semantic similarity as a special case of semantic relatedness (relation is IS-A)
• For example, car-gasoline are related, but car-bicycle are similar.
• "... measures of similarity ... are seldom accompanied by an independent characterization of the phenomenon they are measuring ... The worth of a similarity measure is in its fidelity to human behavior, as measured by predictions of human performance on experimental tasks."
• Note
• polysemy as a special case of homonymy (the different meanings have a common aspect, and are hence called `senses')
• For example, `man' is polysemous (species, gender, adult) while `bank' is homonymous (river-edge, money-place).

An Approach for Measuring Semantic Similarity between Words Using Multiple Information Sources. Yuhua Li, Zuhair A. Bandar, and David McLean. IEEE KDE 2003

• Key Ideas
• Comments
• "Similarity between two words is often represented by similarity between concepts associated with the two words."
• "Evidence from psychological experiments demonstrate that similarity is context-dependent and may be asymmetric ... Experimental results investigating the effects of asymmetry suggest that the average difference in ratings for a word pair is less than 5 percent"