The acquisition of axioms for ontology learning using named entities

Abstract

Domain ontologies facilitate the organization, sharing, and reuse of domain knowledge. The construction of ontologies from text deals with the extraction of concepts and relations from text collection. A huge challenge is the learning of more expressive ontologies which includes relations such as disjointness or equivalence between classes. In our work, we exploit a text collection written in English with occurrence of named entities giving information about individuals in an specific domain knowledge for generating axioms. The co-ocurrence in texts of named entities is exploited to establish axiomatic relations between classes such as subClassOf, disjointWith, and equivalentClass; as well as between individuals as sameIndividualAs and differentFrom by using the instanceOf relation. For this purpose, a Named Entity Recognition tool was used for the identification of instanceOf relation, the linguistic context where the classes co-occur was extracted for the identification of axioms. The experiments were made on a text collection about the tourist domain. The results show that named entities provide good evidence for the identification of axiomatic relations.