Exploring Wasserstein Distance across Concept Embeddings for Ontology Matching

Abstract

Measuring the distance between ontological elements is fundamental for ontology matching. String-based distance metrics are notorious for shallow syntactic matching. In this exploratory study, we investigate Wasserstein distance targeting continuous space that can incorporate various types of information. We use a pre-trained word embeddings system to embed ontology element labels. We examine the effectiveness of Wasserstein distance for measuring similarity between ontologies, and discovering and refining matchings between individual elements. Our experiments with the OAEI conference track and MSE benchmarks achieved competitive results compared to the leading systems.