Soft Similarity and Soft Cosine Measure: Similarity of Features in Vector Space Model

We show how to consider similarity between features for calculation of similarity of objects in the Vector Space Model (VSM) for machine learning algorithms and other classes of methods that involve similarity between objects. Unlike LSA, we assume that similarity between features is known (say, from a synonym dictionary) and does not need to be learned from the data.We call the proposed similarity measure soft similarity.Similarity between...