The construction of domain ontology and its application to document retrieval

Abstract

Ontology means terms used in a specific domain, the definition of relationships among the terms, and the expression of the relationships in a hierarchical structure. This study suggests a method of constructing domain ontology using terminology processing and applies the method to document retrieval. In order to construct ontology, it proposes an algorithm that classifies the patterns of nouns and suffices which compose terminology, in domain texts, extracts terminology, and build a hierarchical structure. The experiment used documents related to pharmacy, and the algorithm showed accuracy of 92.57% for singleton terms and 66.64% for multi-word terms on the average. Constructed ontology, which forms natural groups of senses centering on specific nouns or suffices composing the terminology with semantic information, can be utilized in approaching the knowledge of special areas such as document retrieval. According to the result of document retrieval based on the constructed ontology, the system improved accuracy by 14.28% compared to keyword-based document retrieval. © Springer-Verlag 2004.