Word sense disambiguation as the primary step of ontology integration

Abstract

The recommendable primary step of ontology integration is annotation of ontology components with entries from WordNet or other dictionary sources in order to disambiguate their meaning. This paper presents an approach to automatically disambiguating the meaning of OWL ontology classes by providing sense annotation from WordNet. A class name is disambiguated using the names of the related classes, by comparing the taxonomy of the ontology with the portions of the WordNet taxonomy corresponding to all possible meanings of the class. The equivalence of the taxonomies is expressed by a probability function called affinity function. We apply two different basic techniques to compute the affinity coefficients: one based on semantic similarity calculation and the other on analyzing overlaps between word definitions and hyponyms. A software prototype is provided to evaluate the approach, as well as to determine which of the two disambiguation techniques produces better results. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.