An improved semantic similarity measure for document clustering based on topic maps

A major computational burden, while performing document clustering, is the calculation of similarity measure between a pair of documents. Similarity measure is a function that assigns a real number between 0 and 1 to a pair of documents, depending upon the degree of similarity between them. A value of zero means that the documents are completely dissimilar whereas a value of one indicates that the documents are practically identical. Traditionally, vector-based models have been used for computing the document similarity. The vectorbased models represent several features present in documents. These approaches to similarity measures, in general, cannot account for the semantics of the document. Documents written in human languages contain contexts and the words used to describe these contexts are generally semantically related. Motivated by this fact, many researchers have proposed semantic-based similarity measures by utilizing text annotation through external thesauruses like WordNet (a lexical database). In this paper, we define a semantic similarity measure based on documents represented in topic maps. Topic maps are rapidly becoming an industrial standard for knowledge representation with a focus for later search and extraction. The documents are transformed into a topic map based coded knowledge and the similarity between a pair of documents is represented as a correlation between the common patterns (sub-trees). The experimental studies on the text mining datasets reveal that this new similarity measure is more effective as compared to commonly used similarity measures in text clustering. Keywords— semantic similarity, document clustering, topic map