Ontology alignment based on word embedding and random forest classification

Abstract

Ontology alignment is crucial for integrating heterogeneous data sources and forms an important component of the semantic web. Accordingly, several ontology alignment techniques have been proposed and used for discovering correspondences between the concepts (or entities) of different ontologies. Most alignment techniques depend on string-based similarities which are unable to handle the vocabulary mismatch problem. Also, determining which similarity measures to use and how to effectively combine them in alignment systems are challenges that have persisted in this area. In this work, we introduce a random forest classifier approach for ontology alignment which relies on word embedding for determining a variety of semantic similarity features between concepts. Specifically, we combine string-based and semantic similarity measures to form feature vectors that are used by the classifier model to determine when concepts align. By harnessing background knowledge and relying on minimal information from the ontologies, our approach can handle knowledge-light ontological resources. It also eliminates the need for learning the aggregation weights of a composition of similarity measures. Experiments using Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) dataset and real-world ontologies highlight the utility of our approach and show that it can outperform state-of-the-art alignment systems. Code related to this paper is available at: https://bitbucket.org/paravariar/rafcom.