Evolution of Semantic Similarity—A Survey

Estimating the semantic similarity between text data is one of the challenging and open research problems in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The versatility of natural language makes it difficult to define rule-based methods for determining semantic similarity measures. To address this issue, various semantic similarity methods have been proposed over the years. This survey article traces the evolution of such methods beginning from traditional NLP techniques such as kernel-based methods to the most recent research work on transformer-based models, categorizing them based on their underlying principles as knowledge-based, corpus-based, deep neural network–based methods, and hybrid methods. Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each method, this survey provides a comprehensive view of existing systems in place for new researchers to experiment and develop innovative ideas to address the issue of semantic similarity.