Unsupervised Semantic Similarity Computation using Web Search Engines

In this paper, we propose two novel web-based metrics for semantic similarity computation between words. Both metrics use a web search engine in order to exploit the retrieved information for the words of interest. The first metric considers only the page counts returned by a search engine, based on the work of [1]. The second downloads a number of the top ranked documents and applies "widecontext" and "narrow-context" metrics. The proposed metrics work automatically, without consulting any human annotated knowledge resource. The metrics are compared with WordNet-based methods. The metrics' performance is evaluated in terms of correlation with respect to the pairs of the commonly used Charles - Miller dataset. The proposed "wide-context" metric achieves 71% correlation, which is the highest score achieved among the fully unsupervised metrics in the literature up to date.