UMLS::Similarity - This is a suite of Perl modules that implements a number of measures of semantic relatedness. These algorithms use a backend taxonomy of concepts to generate relatedness scores between concepts.
use UMLS::Similarity::path; use UMLS::Interface;
This package consists of Perl modules along with supporting Perl programs that implement the semantic relatedness measures described by Leacock & Chodorow (1998) and a simple path based measure.
This package is essentially a re-implementation of the WordNet::Similarity and Semantic::Similarity suite of modules. WordNet::Similarity is tied to the WordNet lexical database. But, suppose we wish to use these techniques in the domain of medical informatics, for instance. This re-implementation allows one to replace WordNet with another domain-specific taxonomy, and use this to find semantic relatedness of concepts in that domain.
The Perl modules are designed as objects with methods that take as input two word senses. The semantic relatedness of these word senses is returned by these methods. A quantitative measure of the degree to which two word senses are related has wide ranging applications in numerous areas, such as word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, etc. For example, in order to determine which sense of a given word is being used in a particular context, the sense having the highest relatedness with its context word senses is most likely to be the sense being used. Similarly, in information retrieval, retrieving documents containing highly related concepts are more likely to have higher precision and recall values.
The following sections describe the organization of this software package and how to use it. A few typical examples are given to help clearly understand the usage of the modules and the supporting utilities.
perl(1), UMLS::Similarity::res(3), UMLS::Similarity::path(3)
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jrennie/WordNet
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wn-similarity
Bridget T McInnes <bthomson@cs.umn.edu> Siddharth Patwardhan <sidd@cs.utah.edu> Serguei Pakhomov <pakhomov.serguei@mayo.edu> Ted Pedersen <tpederse@d.umn.edu>
Copyright 2004-2009 by Bridget T McInnes, Siddharth Patwardhan, Serguei Pakhomov and Ted Pedersen
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
