A Comparison of Corpus-Based and Structural Methods on Approximation of Semantic Relatedness in Ontologies

In this paper, the authors compare the performance of corpus-based and structural approaches to determine semantic relatedness in ontologies. A large light-weight ontology and a news corpus are used as materials. The results show that structural measures proposed by Wu and Palmer, and Leacock and Chodorow have superior performance when cut-off values are used. The corpus-based method Latent Semantic Analysis is found more accurate on specific rank levels. In further investigation, the approximation of structural measures and Latent Semantic Analysis show a low level of overlap and the methods are found to approximate different types of relations. The results suggest that a combination of corpus-based methods and structural methods should be used and appropriate cut-off values should be selected according to the intended use case.