Comparison Purpose and the Respects for Similarity

In this paper, we identify the role that similarity plays in the automatic generation of textual comparisons between entities. We emphasise one particular characteristic of similarity measures that is essential to performing our task: the determination of the respects for similarity. When we say that two entities are similar, there is either an explicit or implicit context that bounds their similarity. In on our analyses, we found that the respect under which two entities are seen as similar is set by the goal underlying the comparison process