It depends

Keßler Carsten

Abstract

Context plays a crucial role for semantic similarity measurements. Depending on aspects such as location, time, task and user preferences, the respects that play a role for the comparison of concepts may vary. This variance should be reflected in a change of the similarity measure- ments’ results. Although this dependency has been observed in various human subject tests and is accounted for in recent similarity theories, there is no generic model of the characteristics of similarity measure- ment so far. The objective of this research is the formalization of such a model, which clarifies the exact systematics of the dependency of similar- ity on context. From a practical perspective, this model must allow for the determination of the most influential contextual aspects for similarity measurements in a concrete application.