Computing Semantic Relatedness using Wikipedia Link Structure

This paper describes a new technique for obtaining measures of semantic relatedness. Like other recent approaches, it uses Wikipedia to provide a vast amount of structured world knowledge about the terms of interest. Our system, the Wikipedia Link Vector Model or WLVM, is unique in that it does so using only the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia rather than its full textual content. To evaluate the algorithm we use a large, widely used test set of manually defined measures of semantic relatedness as our bench-mark. This allows direct comparison of our system with other similar techniques.