Ontology Learning and Semantic Annotation: a Necessary Symbiosis

Emiliano Giovannetti, Simone Marchi, Simonetta Montemagni, Roberto Bartolini


Abstract
Semantic annotation of text requires the dynamic merging of linguistically structured information and a “world model”, usually represented as a domain-specific ontology. On the other hand, the process of engineering a domain-ontology through semi-automatic ontology learning system requires the availability of a considerable amount of semantically annotated documents. Facing this bootstrapping paradox requires an incremental process of annotation-acquisition-annotation, whereby domain-specific knowledge is acquired from linguistically-annotated texts and then projected back onto texts for extra linguistic information to be annotated and further knowledge layers to be extracted. The presented methodology is a first step in the direction of a full “virtuous” circle where the semantic annotation platform and the evolving ontology interact in symbiosis. As a case study we have chosen the semantic annotation of product catalogues. We propose a hybrid approach, combining pattern matching techniques to exploit the regular structure of product descriptions in catalogues, and Natural Language Processing techniques which are resorted to analyze natural language descriptions. The semantic annotation involves the access to the ontology, semi-automatically bootstrapped with an ontology learning tool from annotated collections of catalogues.
Anthology ID:
L08-1164
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/534_paper.pdf
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Emiliano Giovannetti, Simone Marchi, Simonetta Montemagni, and Roberto Bartolini. 2008. Ontology Learning and Semantic Annotation: a Necessary Symbiosis. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Ontology Learning and Semantic Annotation: a Necessary Symbiosis (Giovannetti et al., LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/534_paper.pdf