An Effective TF/IDF-Based Text-to-Text Semantic Similarity Measure for Text Classification

The use of semantics in tasks related to information retrieval has become, in recent years, a vast field of research. Considering supervised text classification, which is the main interest of this work, semantics can be involved at different steps of text processing: during indexing step, during training step and during class prediction step. As for class prediction step, new text-to-text semantic similarity measures can replace classical similarity measures that are traditionally used by some classification methods for decision-making. In this paper we propose a new measure for assessing semantic similarity between texts based on TF/IDF with a new function that aggregates semantic similarities between concepts representing the compared text documents pair-to-pair. Experimental results demonstrate that our measure outperforms other semantic and classical measures with significant improvements.