A New Alignment Word-Space Approach for Measuring Semantic Similarity for Arabic Text

This work presents a new alignment word-space approach for measuring the similarity between two snipped texts. The approach combines two similarity measurement methods: alignment-based and vector space-based. The vector space-based method depends on a semantic net that represents the meaning of words as vectors. These vectors are lemmatized to enrich the search space. The alignment-based method generates an alignment word space matrix (AWSM) for the snipped texts according to the generated semantic word spaces. Finally, the degree of sentence semantic similarity is measured using some proposed alignment rules. Four experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, using two different datasets. The experimental results proved that applying the lemmatization process for the input text and the vector model has a better effect. The degree of correctness of the results reaches 0.7212 which is considered one of the best two results of the published Arabic semantic similarities.