Towards Human Perception of Relatedness : A Fuzzy Semantic Relatedness Measure

The goal of this study is to present a concept of a fuzzy semantic relatedness measure that was derived on the basis of human perception of relatedness and a fuzzy set theory. The fuzzy semantic relatedness measure is perceived as a linguistic variable that can take one of the following values: lack of relationships, weak relationships, neutral, strong relationships, synonyms. These values are treated as fuzzy sets with membership functions that can be defined with the use of different semantic relatedness measures. It seems that the concept of the semantic relatedness measure could be incorporated in information retrieval and information filtering systems