Title
Similarity of objects and the meaning of words
Abstract
We survey the emerging area of compression-based, parameter-free, similarity distance measures useful in data-mining, pattern recognition, learning and automatic semantics extraction. Given a family of distances on a set of objects, a distance is universal up to a certain precision for that family if it minorizes every distance in the family between every two objects in the set, up to the stated precision (we do not require the universal distance to be an element of the family). We consider similarity distances for two types of objects: literal objects that as such contain all of their meaning, like genomes or books, and names for objects. The latter may have literal embodyments like the first type, but may also be abstract like “red” or “christianity.” For the first type we consider a family of computable distance measures corresponding to parameters expressing similarity according to particular features between pairs of literal objects. For the second type we consider similarity distances generated by web users corresponding to particular semantic relations between the (names for) the designated objects. For both families we give universal similarity distance measures, incorporating all particular distance measures in the family. In the first case the universal distance is based on compression and in the second case it is based on Google page counts related to search terms. In both cases experiments on a massive scale give evidence of the viability of the approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1007/11750321_2
theory and applications of models of computation
Keywords
DocType
Volume
certain precision,literal object,universal similarity distance measure,literal embodyments,particular semantic relation,particular distance measure,computable distance,particular feature,similarity distance,universal distance
Conference
abs/cs/0602065
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0302-9743
3-540-34021-1
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.77
17
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rudi Cilibrasi112813.21
Paul Vitányi22130287.76