Maybe the cortical.io API could help with your problem. The approach here is that every word is converted into a semantic fingerprint that characterizes the meaning of it with 16K semantic features. Phrases, sentences or longer texts are converted into fingerprints by ORing the word fingerprints together. After this conversion into a (numeric) binary vector representation semantic distance can easily be computed using distance measures like Euclidian Distance or cosine-similarity.
All necessary conversion- and comparison-functions are provided by the api.
