A corpus-based approach for the induction of ontology lexica

Abstract

While there are many large knowledge bases (e.g. Freebase, Yago, DBpedia) as well as linked data sets available on the web, they typically lack lexical information stating how the properties and classes are realized lexically. If at all, typically only one label is attached to these properties, thus lacking any deeper syntactic information, e.g. about syntactic arguments and how these map to the semantic arguments of the property as well as about possible lexical variants or paraphrases. While there are lexicon models such as lemon allowing to define a lexicon for a given ontology, the cost involved in creating and maintaining such lexica is substantial, requiring a high manual effort. Towards lowering this effort, in this paper we present a semi-automatic approach that exploits a corpus to find occurrences in which a given property is expressed, and generalizing over these occurrences by extracting dependency paths that can be used as a basis to create lemon lexicon entries. We evaluate the resulting automatically generated lexica with respect to DBpedia as dataset and Wikipedia as corresponding corpus, both in an automatic mode, by comparing to a manually created lexicon, and in a semi-automatic mode in which a lexicon engineer inspected the results of the corpus-based approach, adding them to the existing lexicon if appropriate. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.