Improving Semantic Similarity for Pairs of Short Biomedical Texts with Concept Definitions and Ontology Structure

Finding semantic similarity between short biomedical texts, such as article abstracts or experiment descriptions, may provide important information for health researchers. This paper presents a method for calculating text similarity in the biomedical context. The method implements a pairwise concept semantic similarity measure that uses concept definitions and ontology structure. The respective results have demonstrated an improved performance in comparison with a previous version of the method using lexical-based measures as similarity function, as well as with other alternative tools for measuring text similarity.