This paper describes FCICU team systems that participated in SemEval-2017 Semantic Textual Similarity task (Task1) for monolingual and cross-lingual sentence pairs. A sense-based language independent textual similarity approach is presented, in which a proposed alignment similarity method coupled with new usage of a semantic network (BabelNet) is used. Additionally, a previously proposed integration between sense-based and sur-face-based semantic textual similarity approach is applied together with our proposed approach. For all the tracks in Task1, Run1 is a string kernel with alignments metric and Run2 is a sense-based alignment similarity method. The first run is ranked 10th, and the second is ranked 12th in the primary track, with correlation 0.619 and 0.617 respectively