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intended to describe one of the most promising approaches
we have found. This approach consists of studying the cooccurrences of words in a significant book sample from the
human literature. Therefore, the main contributions presented in this work are the following:

1. Edge-counting measures which are based on the computation of the number of taxonomical links separating
two concepts represented in a given dictionary [15].

1. We propose for the first time to study the co-occurrence
of words in the human literature for trying to determine the semantic similarity between words.

3. Information theoretic measures which try to determine
similarity between concepts as a function of what both
concepts have in common in a given ontology. These
measures are typically computed from concept distribution in text corpora [13].

2. Feature-based measures which try to estimate the amount
of common and non-common taxonomical information
retrieved from dictionaries [23].

2. We evaluate our proposal according to the word pairs
included in the Miller &amp; Charles benchmark data set
[19] which is one of the most widely used on this context.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes related approaches that are proposed in the literature
currently available. Section 3 describes the key ideas to understand our contribution. Section 4 presents a qualitative
evaluation of our method, and finally, we draw conclusions
and put forward future lines of research in Section 5.



4. Distributional measures which use text corpora as source.
They look for word co-occurrences in the Web or large
document collections using search engines [6].

There are also several related works that try to combine
semantic similarity measures. These methods come from
the field of semantic similarity aggregation. For instance
COMA, where a library of semantic similarity measures and
friendly user interface to aggregate them are provided [11],
or MaF, a matching framework that allow users to combine
simple similarity measures to create more complex ones [17].

The notion of semantic similarity is a widely intuitive concept. Miller and Charles wrote: ...subjects accept instructions to judge similarity of meaning as if they understood
immediately what is being requested, then make their judgments rapidly with no apparent difficulty [19]. This view has
been reinforced by other researchers who observed that similarity is treated as a property characterized by human perception and intuition [25]. In general, it is assumed that not
only are the participants comfortable in their understanding of the concept, but also when they perform a judgment
task they do it using the same procedure or at least have a
common understanding of the attribute they are measuring

These approaches can be even improved by using weighted
means where the weights are automatically computed by
means of heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms. In that
case, most promising measures receive better weights. This
means that all the efforts are focused on getting more complex weighted means that after some training are able to
recognize the most important atomic measures for solving
a given problem [17]. There are two major problems that
make these approaches not very appropriate in real environments: First problem is that these techniques require a lot
of training efforts. Secondly, these weights are obtained for
a specific problem and it is not easy to find a way to transfer
them to other problems.

In the past, there have been great efforts in finding new semantic similarity measures mainly due to its fundamental
importance in many computer related fields. The detection of different formulations of the same concept is a key
method for solving a lot of problems. To name only a few,
we can refer to a) data clustering where semantic similarity
measures are necessary to detect and group the most similar subjects [4], b) data matching which consists of finding
some data representing the same concept across different
data sources [16], c) data mining where using appropriate
semantic similarity measures can facilitate the processes of
text classification and pattern discovery in large texts [10],
or d) machine translation where the detection of term pairs
expressed in different languages but referring to a same idea
is of vital importance [8]. Semantic similarity is also of vital importance for the community working on Linked Data
paradigms since software tools for automatically discovering relationships between data items within different Linked
Data sources can be very useful [28].

Our proposal is a distributional measure since, as it will be
explained in more depth, we try to look for co-occurrences
of words in the same text corpus. In fact, we are going
to get benefit from a corpus of digitized texts containing 5.2
million books which represent about four percent of all books
ever printed [18]. Achieving good results could represent an
improvement over traditional approaches since our approach
does not incur in the drawbacks from the heuristic and metaheuristic methods, and does not require any kind of training
or knowledge transfer.

According to Sanchez el al. [27], most of existing semantic
similarity measures can be classified into one of these four
main categories:



Semantic similarity measurement is a well established field
of research whereby two text entities are assigned a score
based on the likeness of their meaning. More formally, we
can define a semantic similarity measure as a function µ1 x
µ2 → R that associates the degree of similarity for the text
entities µ1 and µ2 to a score s ∈ R in the range [0, 1] where
a score of 0 stands for no similarity at all, and 1 for total
similarity of the meanings associated to µ1 and µ2 .
Our key contribution is based on the idea of exploring culturomics for designing such a function, thus the application