The need for paradigm shift in semantic similarity and semantic relatedness: from cognitive semantics perspective

Choi, Youngseok and Park, Jinsoo (2013) The need for paradigm shift in semantic similarity and semantic relatedness: from cognitive semantics perspective. Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems, 19 (1), 111-123. (doi:10.13088/jiis.2013.19.1.111).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Semantic similarity/relatedness measure between two concepts plays an important role in research on system integration and database integration. Moreover, current research on keyword recommendation or tag clustering strongly depends on this kind of semantic measure. For this reason, many researchers in various fields including computer science and computational linguistics have tried to improve methods to calculating semantic similarity/relatedness measure. This study of similarity between concepts is meant to discover how a computational process can model the action of a human to determine the relationship between two concepts. Most research on calculating semantic similarity usually uses ready-made reference knowledge such as semantic network and dictionary to measure concept similarity. The topological method is used to calculated relatedness or similarity between concepts based on various forms of a semantic network including a hierarchical taxonomy. This approach assumes that the semantic network reflects the human knowledge well. The nodes in a network represent concepts, and way to measure the conceptual similarity between two nodes are also regarded as ways to determine the conceptual similarity of two words(i.e,. two nodes in a network). Topological method can be categorized as node-based or edge-based, which are also called the information content approach and the conceptual distance approach, respectively. The node-based approach is used to calculate similarity between concepts based on how much information the two concepts share in terms of a semantic network or taxonomy while edge-based approach estimates the distance between the nodes that correspond to the concepts being compared. Both of two approaches have assumed that the semantic network is static. That means topological approach has not considered the change of semantic relation between concepts in semantic network. However, as information communication technologies make advantage in sharing knowledge among people, semantic relation between concepts in semantic network may change. To explain the change in semantic relation, we adopt the cognitive semantics. The basic assumption of cognitive semantics is that humans judge the semantic relation based on their cognition and understanding of concepts. This cognition and understanding is called 'World Knowledge.' World knowledge can be categorized as personal knowledge and cultural knowledge. Personal knowledge means the knowledge from personal experience. Everyone can have different Personal Knowledge of same concept. Cultural Knowledge is the knowledge shared by people who are living in the same culture or using the same language. People in the same culture have common understanding of specific concepts. Cultural knowledge can be the starting point of discussion about the change of semantic relation. If the culture shared by people changes for some reasons, the human's cultural knowledge may also change. Today's society and culture are changing at a past face, and the change of cultural knowledge is not negligible issues in the research on semantic relationship between concepts. In this paper, we propose the future directions of research on semantic similarity. In other words, we discuss that how the research on semantic similarity can reflect the change of semantic relation caused by the change of cultural knowledge. We suggest three direction of future research on semantic similarity. First, the research should include the versioning and update methodology for semantic network. Second, semantic network which is dynamically generated can be used for the calculation of semantic similarity between concepts. If the researcher can develop the methodology to extract the semantic network from given knowledge base in real time, this approach can solve many problems related to the change of semantic relation. Third, the statistical approach based on corpus analysis can be an alternative for the method using semantic network. We believe that these proposed research direction can be the milestone of the research on semantic relation.

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