Computing Degree of Association Based on Different Semantic Relationships

In domain ontologies, there is usually no weight assigned to the link between two concepts. This has been considered as one of main obstacles in using ontologies. Semantic Association (SA) is to depict the correlation of two concepts, and can be measured as the weight of the link. In this paper, we defined Degree of Association (DOA) to measure SA from a concept to its direct-related concept in domain ontology, and proposed a Language-Model-Based Method (LMBM) to compute DOA. Our idea comes from the intuition that the semantic relationship between two concepts implies certain semantic association of them. We took probabilistic model for computing DOA, and used Maximum Likelihood Estimation to estimate parameters. We tested the proposed method on two different domain ontologies, and applied it in experiments of semantic query expansion. Experimental results show the benefit of our approach and demonstrate the promising effectiveness over semantic query expansion.