Semantic similarity computation based on HowNet2008

Semantic similarity is a fundamental concept and widely researched and used in the fields of natural language processing. By analyzing the definition of the concept in HowNet2008, this paper proposes a new method of semantic similarity calculation. The concepts are classified into three classes: simple concept; complex concept and combined concept. To different concept, we design different method and then transform the similarity calculation of concept into the similarity calculation of the sememe. The similarity of the smeme is computed by the hyponymy of the sememe in the sememe tree. Experiments show the new approach is effective to the similarity calculation and out-performs the conventional computed approaches.