Acquisition of OWL DL axioms from lexical resources

Abstract

State-of-the-art research on automated learning of ontologies from text currently focuses on inexpressive ontologies. The acquisition of complex axioms involving logical connectives, role restrictions, and other expressive features of the Web Ontology Language OWL remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a method and implementation for enriching inexpressive OWL ontologies with expressive axioms which is based on a deep syntactic analysis of natural language definitions. We argue that it can serve as a core for a semi-automatic ontology engineering process supported by a methodology that integrates methods for both ontology learning and evaluation. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by generating complex class descriptions from Wikipedia definitions and from a fishery glossary provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.