Measuring taxonomic consistency of ontologies using lexical semantic relatedness

Existing evaluation methods either investigate whether ontologies are “fit for purpose”, or focus on evaluating consistencies of the data in regard to the axioms defined in the ontologies. In this paper, we focus on how to evaluate the consistency of ontology with respect to taxonomic relationships, and we suggest a new measure to evaluate the taxonomic consistency of an ontology. As the semantic relatedness measure between concepts in ontologies is the key part of ontology consistency measure, we firstly propose a new approach to measure the semantic relatedness for pairs of words. Several experiments demonstrate that the proposed ontology measure identifying the consistency with respect to taxonomic relationships is better than existing approaches.