On the semantic representation and extraction of complex category descriptors

Abstract

Natural language descriptors used for categorizations are present from folksonomies to ontologies. While some descriptors are composed of simple expressions, other descriptors have complex compositional patterns (e.g. 'French Senators Of The Second Empire', 'Churches Destroyed In The Great Fire Of London And Not Rebuilt'). As conceptual models get more complex and decentralized, more content is transferred to unstructured natural language descriptors, increasing the terminological variation, reducing the conceptual integration and the structure level of the model. This work describes a representation for complex natural language category descriptors (NLCDs). In the representation, complex categories are decomposed into a graph of primitive concepts, supporting their interlinking and semantic interpretation. A category extractor is built and the quality of its extraction under the proposed representation model is evaluated. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.