New ontology-based semantic similarity measure for the biomedical domain

The goal of this research is to propose a new ontology-based semantic similarity measure and apply it into the biomedical domain. We also apply the ontology-based semantic similarity measures from NLP into the biomedicine domain within the framework of the UMLS. The proposed measure is based on the path length between the concept nodes as well as the depth of the lcs node in the ontology hierarchy tree. The proposed similarity method was evaluated relative to human experts' ratings, and compared with the existing measures on sets of concepts using the MeSH terminology within the UMLS. The experimental results validate the efficiency of the proposed method, and demonstrate that our semantic similarity measure, compared with the existing techniques, gives the best overall results of correlation with experts' ratings.