Title
The Semantic Similarity Ensemble
Abstract
Computational measures of semantic similarity between geographic terms provide valuable support across geographic information retrieval, data mining, and information integration. To date, a wide variety of approaches to geo-semantic similarity have been devised. A judgment of similarity is not intrinsically right or wrong, but obtains a certain degree of cognitive plausibility, depending on how closely itmimics human behavior. Thus selecting the most appropriate measure for a specific task is a significant challenge. To address this issue, we make an analogy between computational similarity measures and soliciting domain expert opinions, which incorporate a subjective set of beliefs, perceptions, hypotheses, and epistemic biases. Following this analogy, we define the semantic similarity ensemble (SSE) as a composition of different similarity measures, acting as a panel of experts having to reach a decision on the semantic similarity of a set of geographic terms. The approach is evaluated in comparison to human judgments, and results indicate that an SSE performs better than the average of its parts. Although the best member tends to outperform the ensemble, all ensembles outperform the average performance of each ensemble's member. Hence, in contexts where the best measure is unknown, the ensemble provides a more cognitively plausible approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.5311/JOSIS.2013.7.128
JOURNAL OF SPATIAL INFORMATION SCIENCE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
semantic similarity ensemble, SSE, lexical similarity, semantic similarity, ensemble modeling, geo-semantics, expert disagreement, WordNet
Journal
abs/1401.2517
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
7
1948-660X
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
11
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrea Ballatore118913.99
Michela Bertolotto286391.77
David C. Wilson374367.35