Towards automatic generation of “preference profile” for primitive concept similarity measures on SNOMED CT

Abstract

Recently, a non-standard reasoning service of measuring similarity between two concepts has been proposed for Description Logic (DL) ontologies, in addition to the classical reasoning service of testing subsumption and logical equivalence. One of the previous works suggests that similarity not only depends on the objective aspects (i.e. concept descriptions of the two concepts), but is also influenced by the subjective factors (i.e. judgments of the viewing agent). In this paper, we propose to employ various text similarity measures to compare the textual annotations of primitive concepts as well as primitive roles from the side of estimating human experts' interpretations. A collection of primitive similarity degrees obtained in this way is regarded as an automatically-generated possible doctors' judgments (preference profile) for primitive similarity measures. We perform extensive experiments on the renown clinical ontology SNOMED CT. After generating the primitive concepts similarity measures with various similarity methods, this paper presented interesting findings from the experiments and discuss benefits and usability of our approach.