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Normalized Google Distance


The Normalized Google Distance is a semantic similarity measure derived from the number of hits returned by the Google search engine for a given set of keywords. Keywords with the same or similar meanings in a natural language sense tend to be "close" in units of Normalized Google Distance, while words with dissimilar meanings tend to be farther apart.

Specifically, the Normalized Google Distance (NGD) between two search terms x and y is

where N is the total number of web pages searched by Google multiplied by the average number of singleton search terms occurring on pages; f(x) and f(y) are the number of hits for search terms x and y, respectively; and f(xy) is the number of web pages on which both x and y occur.

If the then x and y are viewed as alike as possible, but if then x and y are very different. If the two search terms x and y never occur together on the same web page, but do occur separately, the NGD between them is infinite. If both terms always occur together, their NGD is zero.


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