A feature and information theoretic framework for semantic similarity and relatedness

Semantic similarity and relatedness measures between ontology concepts are useful in many research areas. While similarity only considers subsumption relations to assess how two objects are alike, relatedness takes into account a broader range of relations (e.g., part-of). In this paper, we present a framework, which maps the feature-based model of similarity into the information theoretic domain. A new way of computing IC values directly from an ontology structure is also introduced. This new model, called Extended Information Content (eIC) takes into account the whole set of semantic relations defined in an ontology. The proposed framework enables to rewrite existing similarity measures that can be augmented to compute semantic relatedness. Upon this framework, a new measure called FaITH (Feature and Information THeoretic) has been devised. Extensive experimental evaluations confirmed the suitability of the framework. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.