Semantic Distance Measures

The measurement of information is potentially as important to an information engineer as the measurement of physical quantities is to a civil or mechanical engineer. This article introduces semantic measures, representing the distance between the meanings of two messages. We demonstrate one possible application by giving a small-scale example in which a semantic measure was used to retrieve information by meaning rather than by word-occurrence. The distance function between the meanings of two messages can be generalized to cover fuzzy meanings. A possible application, the processing of free responses to opinion polls, is described.