Folktale similarity based on ontological abstraction
This paper presents a method to compute similarity of folktales based on conceptual overlap at various levels of abstraction as defined in Dutch WordNet. The method is applied on a corpus of Dutch folktales and evaluated using a comparison to traditional folktale similarity analysis based on the Aarne–Thompson–Uther (ATU) classification system. Document similarity computed by the presented method is in agreement with traditional analysis for a certain amount of folktale pairs, but differs for other pairs. However, it can be argued that the current approach computes an alternative, data-driven type of similarity. Using WordNet instead of a domain-specific ontology or classification system ensures applicability of the method outside of the folktale domain.
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