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.
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Reinberger, ML., Spyns, P., Pretorius, A.J., Daelemans, W. (2004). Automatic Initiation of an Ontology. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2004: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE. OTM 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3290. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30468-5_39
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