Semantic similarity between words is becoming a generic problem for many applications of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. This paper explores the determination of semantic similarity by a number of information sources, which consist of structural semantic information from a lexical taxonomy and information content from a corpus. To investigate how information sources could be used effectively, a variety of strategies for using various possible information sources are implemented. A new measure is then proposed which combines information sources nonlinearly. Experimental evaluation against a benchmark set of human similarity ratings demonstrates that the proposed measure significantly outperforms traditional similarity measures.

Sentence similarity measures play an increasingly important role in text-related research and applications in areas such as text mining, Web page retrieval, and dialogue systems. Existing methods for computing sentence similarity have been adopted from approaches used for long text documents. These methods process sentences in a very high-dimensional space and are consequently inefficient, require human input, and are not adaptable to some application domains. This paper focuses directly on computing the similarity between very short texts of sentence length. It presents an algorithm that takes account of semantic information and word order information implied in the sentences. The semantic similarity of two sentences is calculated using information from a structured lexical database and from corpus statistics. The use of a lexical database enables our method to model human common sense knowledge and the incorporation of corpus statistics allows our method to be adaptable to different domains. The proposed method can be used in a variety of applications that involve text knowledge representation and discovery. Experiments on two sets of selected sentence pairs demonstrate that the proposed method provides a similarity measure that shows a significant correlation to human intuition