A New Similarity measure for taxonomy based on edge counting

This paper introduces a new similarity measure based on edge counting in a taxonomy like WorldNet orOntology. Measurement of similarity between text segments or concepts is very useful for manyapplications like information retrieval, ontology matching, text mining, and question answering and so on.Several measures have been developed for measuring similarity between two concepts: out of these we seethat the measure given by Wu and Palmer [1] is simple, and gives good performance. Our measure isbased on their measure but strengthens it. Wu and Palmer [1] measure has a disadvantage that it does notconsider how far the concepts are semantically. In our measure we include the shortest path between theconcepts and the depth of whole taxonomy together with the distances used in Wu and Palmer [1]. Also themeasure has following disadvantage i.e. in some situations, the similarity of two elements of an IS-Aontology contained in the neighbourhood exceeds the similarity value of two elements contained in thesame hierarchy. Our measure introduces a penalization factor for this case based upon shortest lengthbetween the concepts and depth of whole taxonomy.