Measuring Conceptual Similarity by Spreading Activation over Wikipedia’s Hyperlink Structure

Keyword-matching systems based on simple models of semantic relatedness are inadequate at modelling the ambiguities in natural language text, and cannot reliably address the increasingly complex information needs of users. In this paper we propose novel methods for computing semantic relatedness by spreading activation energy over the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia. We demonstrate that our techniques can approach state-of-the-art performance, while requiring only a fraction of the background data.