Ontologies, Taxonomies, Thesauri: Learning from Texts

Brewster, Mr. Christopher and Wilks, Prof. Yorick (2004) Ontologies, Taxonomies, Thesauri: Learning from Texts. In Proceedings The Use of Computational Linguistics in the Extraction of Keyword Information from Digital Library Content Workshop, Kings College, London, UK.

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The use of ontologies as representations of knowledge is widespread but their construction, until recently, has been entirely manual. We argue in this paper for the use of text corpora and automated nat- ural language processing methods for the construction of ontologies. We delineate the challenges and present criteria for the selection of appropriate methods. We distinguish three major steps in ontology building: associating terms, constructing hierarchies and labelling re- lations. A number of methods are presented for these purposes ut we conclude that the issue of data-sparsity still is a major challenge. We argue for the use of resources external to the domain specific corpus.

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