Improving Case Retrieval by Enrichment of the Domain Ontology

Abstract

One way of processing case retrieval in a case-based reasoning (CBR) system is using an ontology in order to generalise the target problem in a progressive way, then adapting the source cases corresponding to the generalised target problem. This paper shows how enriching this ontology improves the retrieval and final results of the CBR system. An existing ontology is enriched by automatically adding new classes that will refine the initial organisation of classes. The new classes come from a data mining process using formal concept analysis. Additional data about ontology classes are collected specially for this data mining process. The formal concepts generated by the process are introduced into the ontology as new classes. The new ontology, which is better structured, enables a more fine-grained generalisation of the target problem than the initial ontology. These principles are tested out within Taaable, a CBR system that searches cooking recipes satisfying constraints given by a user, or adapts recipes by substituting certain ingredients for others. The ingredient ontology of Taaable has been enriched thanks to ingredient properties extracted from recipe texts.