semanticrelatedness

Semanticrelatedness is a measure of the degree to which two linguistic items (words, phrases, concepts) are connected in meaning within a language or knowledge representation. It captures associative, functional, and contextual connections that may not entail substitutability. By contrast, semantic similarity refers more narrowly to likeness in properties or roles and is often symmetrical; semanticrelatedness is broader and can be asymmetric in some settings.

Methods: Semanticrelatedness can be assessed via knowledge-based approaches using structured resources such as WordNet or ontologies, where metrics rely on path length between concepts or information content. Common examples include Wu-Palmer, Leacock-Chodorow, and information-content-based measures like Resnik, Lin, and Jiang-Conrath. Distributional approaches derive relatedness from large text corpora by representing items as vectors in a semantic space and computing cosine similarity or other distances; methods include Latent Semantic Analysis, word embeddings, and contextual embeddings. Hybrid methods combine corpus evidence with knowledge structures.

Applications: evaluation of lexical semantic tasks, information retrieval, document clustering, question answering, and sense disambiguation. Semanticrelatedness judgments support taxonomy induction, semantic search, and recommender systems by identifying proximate concepts beyond exact matches.

Challenges: context dependence, polysemy, domain specificity, and cross-lingual transfer. The notion is inherently task- and domain-dependent; a relationship salient in a medical corpus may differ from everyday language.