The Text-to-Onto Ontology Learning Environment.pdf

The TEXT-TO-ONTO Ontology Learning Environment Alexander Maedche and Steffen Staab Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany fmaedche,staabg@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS Abstract Ontologies have become an important means for structuring informa- tion and information systems and, hence, important in knowledge as well as in software engineering. However, there remains the problem of engineering large and adequate ontologies within short time frames in order to keep costs low. For this purpose, we present the TEXT-TO-ONTO Ontology Learning Environment, which is based on a general architecture for discovering conceptual structures and engineering ontologies from text. Our Ontology Learning Environment supports as well the acquisition of conceptual structures as mapping linguistic resources to the acquired structures. 1 Introduction Ontologies 1 have shown their usefulness in application areas such as intelligent infor- mation integration, information brokering and natural-language processing, to name but a few. However, their wide-spread usage is still hindered by ontology engineering be- ing rather time-consuming and, hence, expensive. Our system TEXT-TO-ONTO tries to overcome this knowledge acquisition bottleneck through learning and discovering con- ceptual structures from texts. Natural language texts exhibit morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and conceptual constraints that interact in order to convey a par- ticular meaning to the reader. Thus, the text transports information to the reader and the reader embeds this information into his background knowledge. Through the under- standing of the text data is associated with conceptual structures and new conceptual structures are learned from the interacting constraints given through language. TEXT- TO-ONTO exploits the interacting constraints on the various language levels (from mor- phology to pragmatics and background knowledge) in order to discover ne