# Semantic Similarity In A Taxonomy: An Information-Based Measure And Its Application To Problems Of Ambiguity In Natural Language

RE SNIK QUMIA CS UMD .EDU
Philip Resnik Department of Linguistics an d Institute for Advanced Computer Studies University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 USA

## Abstract

This article presents a measure of semantic similarity in an is-a taxonomy based on the notion of shared information content Experimental evaluation against a benchmark set of human similarity judgments demonstrates that the measure performs better than the traditional edge counting approach The artide presents algorithms that take advan tage of taxonomic similarity in resolving syntactic and semantic ambiguity along with experimental results demonstrating their effectiveness

## 1. Introduction

PA RT-OF
IS-A