Mining ontologies from text

Abstract

Ontologies have become an important means for structuring knowledge and building knowledge-intensive systems. For this purpose, efforts have been made to facilitate the ontology engineering process, in particular the acquisition of ontologies from domain texts. We present a general architecture for discovering conceptual structures and engineering ontologies. Based on our generic architecture we describe a case study for mining ontologies from text using methods based on dictionaries and natural language text. The case study has been carried out in the telecommunications domain. Supporting the overall text ontology engineering process, our comprehensive approach combines dictionary parsing mechanisms for acquiring a domain-specific concept taxonomy with a discovery mechanism for the acquisition of non-taxonomic conceptual relations.