Automatic Initiation of an Ontology

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 e...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: COOPIS
• Authors: Marie-Laure Reinberger, Peter Spyns, A. Johannes Pretorius, Walter Daelemans
• Keywords: COOPIS 2004, Flemish OntoBasis Project, Functional Relations, Information Management, Small Legal Corpus