Title
An ontology-based measure to compute semantic similarity in biomedicine.
Abstract
Proper understanding of textual data requires the exploitation and integration of unstructured and heterogeneous clinical sources, healthcare records or scientific literature, which are fundamental aspects in clinical and translational research. The determination of semantic similarity between word pairs is an important component of text understanding that enables the processing, classification and structuring of textual resources. In the past, several approaches for assessing word similarity by exploiting different knowledge sources (ontologies, thesauri, domain corpora, etc.) have been proposed. Some of these measures have been adapted to the biomedical field by incorporating domain information extracted from clinical data or from medical ontologies (such as MeSH or SNOMED CT). In this paper, these approaches are introduced and analyzed in order to determine their advantages and limitations with respect to the considered knowledge bases. After that, a new measure based on the exploitation of the taxonomical structure of a biomedical ontology is proposed. Using SNOMED CT as the input ontology, the accuracy of our proposal is evaluated and compared against other approaches according to a standard benchmark of manually ranked medical terms. The correlation between the results of the evaluated measures and the human experts' ratings shows that our proposal outperforms most of the previous measures avoiding, at the same time, some of their limitations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.jbi.2010.09.002
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
clinical data,ontologies,snomed ct,ontology-based measure,heterogeneous clinical source,domain corpus,different knowledge source,semantic similarity,input ontology,domain information,biomedical field,biomedicine,considered knowledge base,biomedical ontology,data mining,computational semantics
Ontology,Data mining,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Biomedicine,SNOMED CT,Ontology (information science),Semantic similarity,Scientific literature,Ontology-based data integration,Ranking,Information retrieval
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
44
1
1532-0480
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
109
2.51
33
Authors
3
Search Limit
100109
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Montserrat Batet189937.20
David Sánchez239913.21
Aida Valls356120.52