Is there an algorithm that tells the semantic similarity of two phrases

algorithm nlp semantics
btw0 picture btw0 · Sep 15, 2008 · Viewed 46.4k times · Source

input: phrase 1, phrase 2

output: semantic similarity value (between 0 and 1), or the probability these two phrases are talking about the same thing

Answer

Matt Mower picture Matt Mower · Sep 15, 2008

You might want to check out this paper:

Sentence similarity based on semantic nets and corpus statistics (PDF)

I've implemented the algorithm described. Our context was very general (effectively any two English sentences) and we found the approach taken was too slow and the results, while promising, not good enough (or likely to be so without considerable, extra, effort).

You don't give a lot of context so I can't necessarily recommend this but reading the paper could be useful for you in understanding how to tackle the problem.

Regards,

Matt.

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