Similarity

59 - Distance Measures

Measuring the syntax similarity or semantic word similarity by a specific distance calculation.

Distance Measures show how similar words are to each other. There is word Syntax similarity and Semantic word similarity. Syntax similarity means that sheep and ship are more similar than sheep and lamb, because semantic meaning is ignored. This can be calculated by the Levenshtein Distance that is used by the RapidFuzz library. Semantic similarity measures the meaning of the words, so sheep and lamb are more similar than sheep and ship. This can be calculated by measuring the cosine distance of wordvectors.

Lexical vs Semantic similarity (source)



This article is part of the project Periodic Table of NLP Tasks. Click to read more about the making of the Periodic Table and the project to systemize NLP tasks.