What is Semantic Similarity

A metric that measures the likeness that the two objects have similar meaning (semantic content).

It estimates the taxonomic resemblance of two terms, based on the evaluation of the common semantic evidences extracted from one or several knowledge sources (e.g., textual corpus, thesaurus, taxonomies/ontologies, etc.)). For example, moose and reindeer are similar because they are ruminant mammals of the family Cervidae.

Is a measure of how similar a pair of concepts are (for example event A and event B). The similarity between A and B is related to aspects they share in common.

Semantic similarity, variously also called “semantic closeness /proximity/nearness” is a concept whereby a set of documents or terms within term lists are assigned a metric based on the likeness of their meaning/semantic content. We define two entities to be similar if: (i) both belong to the same class, (ii) both belong to classes that have a common parent class, or (iii) one entity belongs to a class that is a parent class to which the other entity belongs. Furthermore, two relationships are similar if (i) both belong to the same class, (ii) both belong to classes that have a common parent class, or (iii) one relation belongs to a class that is a parent class to which the other relation belongs.

A semantic measure which is a special case of semantic relatedness. This distance uses only synonymy, hyponymy and hyperonymy relationships, and determines whether two words share common characteristics.

A metric that defines the distance between items based on the likeness of their meaning.