Semantic similarity in a taxonomy: An information-based measure and its application to problems of ambiguity in natural language

This article presents a measure of semantic similarity in an is-a taxonomy based on the notion of shared information content. Experimental evaluation against a benchmark set of human similarity judgments demonstrates that the measure performs better than the traditional edge-counting approach. The article presents algorithms that take advantage of taxonomic similarity in resolving syntactic and semantic ambiguity, along with experimental results demonstrating their effectiveness.