Is there an algorithm that tells the semantic similarity of two phrases

Question

input: phrase 1, phrase 2

output: semantic similarity value (between 0 and 1), or the probability these two phrases are talking about the same thing

Answer 1

Take a look at http://mkusner.github.io/publications/WMD.pdf This paper describes an algorithm called Word Mover distance that tries to uncover semantic similarity. It relies on the similarity scores as dictated by word2vec. Integrating this with GoogleNews-vectors-negative300 yields desirable results.