Abstract：A basic approach for measuring semantic similarity/distance between words and concepts is to use lexical taxonomy, such as Wordnet. Hownet is a Chinese semantic dictionary, containing abundant semantic information and ontology knowledge, but has quite different construction and architecture. In this paper, we present a new approach using Hownet by drawing in the idea of information theory. We propose that the more semantic information a “sememe” take, the more powerful it in describing concepts. Then we divide “sememe” which describes a concept into two set: directly describing part and indirectly describing part. In the experiments, we demonstrate our method have improved performance in measuring semantic similarity between Chinese words.
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2007, Vol. 21 
