Semantic distillation: a method for clustering objects by their contextual specificity

Techniques for data-mining, latent semantic analysis, contextual search of databases, etc. have long ago been developed by computer scientists working on information retrieval (IR). Experimental scientists, from all disciplines, having to analyse large collections of raw experimental data (astronomical, physical, biological, etc.) have developed powerful methods for their statistical analysis and for clustering, categorising, and classifying objects. Finally, physicists have developed a theory of quantum measurement, unifying the logical, algebraic, and probabilistic aspects of queries into a single formalism. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to show that when formulated at an abstract level, problems from IR, from statistical data analysis, and from physical measurement theories are very similar and hence can profitably be cross-fertilised, and, secondly, to propose a novel method of fuzzy hierarchical clustering, termed \textit{semantic distillation} -- strongly inspired from the theory of quantum measurement --, we developed to analyse raw data coming from various types of experiments on DNA arrays. We illustrate the method by analysing DNA arrays experiments and clustering the genes of the array according to their specificity.Comment: Accepted for publication in Studies in Computational Intelligence, Springer-Verla

Semantic Referencing – Determining Context Weights for Similarity Measurement

Abstract. Semantic similarity measurement is a key methodology in various domains ranging from cognitive science to geographic information retrieval on the Web. Meaningful notions of similarity, however, cannot be determined without taking additional contextual information into account. One way to make similarity measures context-aware is by introducing weights for specific characteristics. Existing approaches to automatically determine such weights are rather limited or require application specific adjustments. In the past, the possibility to tweak similarity theories until they fit a specific use case has been one of the major criticisms for their evaluation. In this work, we propose a novel approach to semi-automatically adapt similarity theories to the user’s needs and hence make them context-aware. Our methodology is inspired by the process of georeferencing images in which known control points between the image and geographic space are used to compute a suitable transformation. We propose to semi-automatically calibrate weights to compute inter-instance and inter-concept similarities by allowing the user to adjust pre-computed similarity rankings. These known control similarities are then used to reference other similarity values. Keywords: Semantic Similarity, Geo-Semantics, Information Retrieval