jiang-conrath-1997-distance-formula

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Semantic_similarity-chunk-1.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:52+00:00

Jiang & Conrath (1997) define semantic distance as dist(A,B) = IC(A) + IC(B) − 2·IC(LCS), converting it to a similarity score.

Summary

This gives the system a concrete, computable way to say how semantically related two concepts are by measuring how much shared structure they have in a knowledge hierarchy: the richer their most specific common ancestor, the closer the two concepts sit. Any downstream comparison of concept relatedness — whether for similarity judgments, retrieval, or reasoning — depends on this formula producing its numbers first.