Short text similarity measurement methods: a review

Short text similarity measurement methods play an important role in many applications within natural language processing. This paper reviews the research literature on short text similarity (STS) measurement method with the aim to (i) classify and give a broad overview of existing techniques; (ii) find out its strengths and weaknesses in terms of the domain the independence, language independence, requirement of semantic knowledge, corpus and training data, ability to identify semantic meaning, word order similarity and polysemy; and (iii) identify semantic knowledge and corpus resource that can be utilized for the STS measurement methods. Furthermore, our study also considers various issues such as the difference between the various text similarity methods and the difference between semantic knowledge sources and corpora for text similarity. Although there are a few review papers in this area, they focus mostly only on one/two existing techniques. Furthermore, existing review papers do not cover recent research. To the best of our knowledge, this is a comprehensive systematic literature review on this topic. The findings of this research can be as follows: It identified four semantic knowledge and eight corpus resources as external resources that can be classified into general-purpose and domain-specific. Furthermore, the existing techniques can be classified into string-based, corpus-based, knowledge-based and hybrid-based. Moreover, expert researchers can utilize this review as a benchmark as well as reference to the limitations of current techniques. The paper also identifies the open issues that can be considered as feasible opportunities for future research directions.

Automated summary

This paper reviews research literature on short text similarity measurement methods, identifying strengths and weaknesses as well as available semantic knowledge and corpus resources. It classifies existing techniques into four categories and provides potential research directions for future studies.