  This paper introduces a new similarity measure based on edge counting in a
taxonomy like WorldNet or Ontology. Measurement of similarity between text
segments or concepts is very useful for many applications like information
retrieval, ontology matching, text mining, and question answering and so on.
Several measures have been developed for measuring similarity between two
concepts: out of these we see that the measure given by Wu and Palmer [1] is
simple, and gives good performance. Our measure is based on their measure but
strengthens it. Wu and Palmer [1] measure has a disadvantage that it does not
consider how far the concepts are semantically. In our measure we include the
shortest path between the concepts and the depth of whole taxonomy together
with the distances used in Wu and Palmer [1]. Also the measure has following
disadvantage i.e. in some situations, the similarity of two elements of an IS-A
ontology contained in the neighborhood exceeds the similarity value of two
elements contained in the same hierarchy. Our measure introduces a penalization
factor for this case based upon shortest length between the concepts and depth
of whole taxonomy.
