12/26/21, 3:28 PM How to Compute the Similarity Between Two Text Documents?

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How to Compute the

Similarity Between Two Text
Documents?
Last modified: September 9, 2020

by Francesco Elia
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Machine Learning
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1. Introduction
Computing the similarity between two text documents is a common
task in NLP, with several practical applications. It has commonly been
used to, for example, rank results in a search engine or recommend
similar content to readers.
Since text similarity is a loosely-defined term, we’ll first have to define it
for the scope of this article. After that, we’ll explore two different ways of
computing similarity and their pros and cons.

2. What Is Text Similarity?

Our first step is to define what we mean by similarity. We’ll do this by
starting with two examples.
Let’s consider the sentences:
The teacher gave his speech to an empty room
There was almost nobody when the professor was talking
Although they convey a very similar meaning, they are written in a
completely different way. In fact, the two sentences just have one word
in common (“the”), and not a really significant one at that.

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Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that we’d want an ideal similarity algorithm
to return a high score for this pair.
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Now let’s change the sentences a little bit:

The teacher gave his speech to an empty a full room
There was almost nobody when the professor was talking
We only changed two words, yet the two sentences now have an
opposite meaning.
When we want to compute similarity based on meaning, we call it
semantic text similarity. Due to the complexities of natural language,
this is a very complex task to accomplish, and it’s still an active research
area. In any case, most modern methods to compute similarity try to
take the semantics into account to some extent.
However, this may not always be needed. Traditional text similarity
methods only work on a lexical level, that is, using only the words in
the sentence. These were mostly developed before the rise of deep
learning but can still be used today. They are faster to implement and
run and can provide a better trade-off depending on the use case.

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In the rest of the article, we’ll not cover advanced methods that are able
to compute fine-grained semantic similarity (for example, handling
negations). Instead, we’ll first cover the foundational aspects of
traditional document similarity algorithms. In the second part, we’ll
then introduce word embeddings which we can use to integrate at least
some semantic considerations.

3. Document Vectors
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The traditional approach to compute text similarity between

documents is to do so by transforming the input documents into real-
valued vectors. The goal is to have a vector space where similar
documents are “close”, according to a chosen similarity measure.
This approach takes the name of Vector Space Model, and it’s very
convenient because it allows us to use simple linear algebra to compute
similarities. We just have to define two things:
1. A way of transforming documents into vectors
2. A similarity measure for vectors
So, let’s see the possible ways of transforming a text document into a
vector.

3.1. Document Vectors: an Example

The simplest way to build a vector from text is to use word counts.
We’ll do this with three example sentences and then compute their
similarity. After that, we’ll go over actual methods that can be used to
compute the document vectors.

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Let’s consider three sentences:

1. We went to the pizza place and you ate no pizza at all
2. I ate pizza with you yesterday at home
3. There’s no place like home

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To build our vectors, we’ll count the occurrences of each word in a

sentence:

Although we didn’t do it in this example, words are usually stemmed or

lemmatized (/cs/stemming-vs-lemmatization) in order to reduce
sparsity.
Once we have our vectors, we can use the de facto standard similarity
measure for this situation: cosine similarity. Cosine similarity
(/cs/euclidean-distance-vs-cosine-similarity) measures the angle
between the two vectors and returns a real value between -1 and 1.
If the vectors only have positive values, like in our case, the output will
actually lie between 0 and 1. It will return 0 when the two vectors are
orthogonal, that is, the documents don’t have any similarity, and 1 when
the two vectors are parallel, that is, the documents are completely
identical:

If we apply it to our example vectors we’ll get:

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As we can see, the first two documents have the highest similarity, since
they share three words. Note that since the word pizza appears two
times it will contribute more to the similarity compared to “at”, “ate” or
“you”.

4. TF-IDF Vectors
The simplified example we’ve just seen uses simple word counts to
build document vectors. In practice, this approach has several problems.
First of all, the most common words are usually the less significant ones.
In fact, most documents will share many occurrences of words like
“the”, “is”, and “of” which will impact our similarity measurement
negatively.
These words are commonly referred to as stopwords and can be
removed in a preprocessing step. Nonetheless, a more sophisticated
approach like TF-IDF can be used to automatically give less weight to
frequent words in a corpus.
The idea behind TF-IDF is that we first compute the number of
documents in which a word appears in. If a word appears in many
documents, it will be less relevant in the computation of the similarity,
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and vice versa. We call this value the inverse document frequency or
IDF, and we can compute it as:

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In the formula, is the corpus, is the total number of documents in it,

and the denominator is the number of documents that contain our word.
For example, if we use the previous three sentences as our corpus, the
word “pizza” will have an IDF equal to:

while the word “yesterday”:

assuming we use base-10 logarithm. Note that if a word were to appear

in all three documents, its IDF would be 0.
We can compute the IDF just once, as a preprocessing step, for each
word in our corpus and it will tell us how significant that word is in the
corpus itself.
At this point, instead of using the raw word counts, we can compute the
document vectors by weighing it with the IDF. For each document, we’ll
compute the count for each word, transform it into a frequency (that is,
dividing the count by the total number of words in the document), and
then multiply by the IDF.

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Given that, the final score for each word will be:

4.1. Pros and Cons of TF-IDF

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The weighting factor provided by this method is a great advantage

compared to using raw word frequencies, and it’s important to note
that its usefulness is not limited to the handling of stopwords.
Every word will have a different weight, and since word usage varies
with the topic of discussion, this weight will be tailored according to
what the input corpus is about.
For example, the word “lawyer” could have low importance in a
collection of legal documents (in terms of establishing similarities
between two of them), while, instead, high importance in a set of news
articles. Intuitively this makes sense because most legal documents will
talk about lawyers, but most news articles won’t.
The downside of this method as described is that it doesn’t take into
account any semantic aspect. Two words like “teacher” and “professor”,
although similar in meaning, will correspond to two different dimensions
of the resulting document vectors, contributing 0 to the overall similarity.
In any case, this method or variations of it, are still very efficient and
widely used, for example in implementing search engine results ranking.
In this scenario, we can use the similarity between the input query and
the result documents to rank higher those that are very similar.

5. Word Embeddings
Word embeddings are high-dimensional vectors that represent words.
We can create them in an unsupervised way from a collection of
documents, in general using neural networks, by analyzing all the
contexts in which the word occurs.

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This results in vectors that are similar (according to cosine similarity) for
words that appear in similar contexts, and thus have a similar meaning.
For example, since the words “teacher” and “professor” can sometimes
be used interchangeably, their embeddings will be close together.
For this reason, using word embeddings can enable us to handle
synonyms or words with similar meaning in the computation of
similarity, which we couldn’t do by using word frequencies.
However, word embeddings are just vector representations of words,
and there are several ways that we can use to integrate them into our
text similarity computation. In the next section, we’ll see a basic example
of how we can do this.

5.1. Document Centroid Vector

The simplest way to compute the similarity between two documents
using word embeddings is to compute the document centroid vector.
This is the vector that’s the average of all the word vectors in the
document.
Since word embeddings have a fixed size, we’ll end up with a final
centroid vector of the same size for each document which we can then
use with cosine similarity.
This method is not optimal since, especially for long documents,
averaging all the words leads to a loss of information. However, in
some cases, for example for small documents, it could be a good
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solution that solves the problems of our previous approach in handling

different but similar words.
Note that we could also integrate a weighting factor in the computation
of the centroid vector, and this could be the same TF-IDF weighting
strategy described above. To do this, when computing the centroid, we
can multiply each word embedding vector by its TF-IDF value, then do a
weighted average:

5.2. Pros and Cons of Word Embeddings

Word embeddings have the advantage of providing rich representations
for words, way more powerful than using the words themselves.
However, in terms of a text similarity algorithm, they don’t provide a
direct solution, but they are rather a tool that can help us improve an
existing one.

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They are useful because they allow us to go beyond a basic lexical
level, but we need to evaluate if this is necessary because they add
extra complexity.

6. Conclusion
Text similarity is a very active research field, and techniques are
continuously evolving and improving. In this article, we’ve given an
overview of possible ways to implement text similarity, focusing on the
Vector Space Model and Word Embeddings.
We’ve seen how methods like TF-IDF can help in weighting terms
appropriately, but without taking into account any semantic aspects. On
the other hand, Word Embeddings can help integrating semantics but
have their own downsides.
For these reasons, when choosing what method to use, it’s important to
always consider our use case and requirements carefully.

If you have a few years of experience in Computer Science or

research, and you’re interested in sharing that experience with the
community, have a look at our Contribution Guidelines
(/contribution-guidelines).

Comments are closed on this article!

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