Automatic initiation of an ontology

M.L. Reinberger, P. Spyns, A.J. Pretorius, W.M.P. Daelemans

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

    25 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We report on an a set of experiments carried out in the context of the Flemish OntoBasis project. Our purpose is to extract semantic relations from text corpora in an unsupervised way and use the output as preprocessed material for the construction of ontologies from scratch. The experiments are evaluated in a quantitative and impressionistic manner. We have worked on two corpora: a 13M words corpus composed of Medline abstracts related to proteins (SwissProt), and a small legal corpus (EU VAT directive) consisting of 43K words. Using a shallow parser, we select functional relations from the syntactic structure subject-verb-direct-object. Those functional relations correspond to what is a called a lexon. The selection is done using prepositional structures and statistical measures in order to select the most relevant lexons. Therefore, the paper stresses the filtering carried out in order to discard automatically all irrelevant structures. Domain experts have evaluated the precision of the outcomes on the SwissProt corpus. The global precision has been rated 55%, with a precision of 42% for the functional relations or lexons, and a precision of 76% for the prepositional relations. For the VAT corpus, a knowledge engineer has judged that the outcomes are useful to support and can speed up his modelling task. In addition, a quantitative scoring method (coverage and accuracy measures resulting in a 52.38% and 47.12% score respectively) has been applied.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationOn the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2004 (Proceedings OTM Confederated International Conferences CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE, Agia Napa, Cyprus, October 25-29, 2004), Part I
    EditorsR. Meersman, Z. Tari
    Place of PublicationBerlin
    PublisherSpringer
    Pages600-617
    ISBN (Print)3-540-23663-5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2004

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
    Volume3290
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Automatic initiation of an ontology'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this