Heuristic semantic walk: Browsing a collaborative network with a search engine-based heuristic

Path search between concepts over a semantic network is an issue of great interest for many applications, such as explanation generation and query expansion. In this study a new approach is proposed, to guide navigation over a collaborative concept network, in order to discover path between concepts. The method uses a semantic heuristic based on proximity measures, which reflects the collective knowledge embedded in search engines. The experiments held on the Wikipedia network and Bing search engine on a range of different semantic measures show that the proposed approach outperforms state of the art search methods.