Meronymic Ontology Extraction via Large Language Models

Dekai Zhang, Simone Conia, Antonio Rago


Abstract
Ontologies have become essential in today’s digital age as a way of organising the vast amount of readily available unstructured text. In providing formal structure to this information, ontologies have immense value and application across various domains, e.g., e-commerce, where countless product listings necessitate proper product organisation. However, the manual construction of these ontologies is a time-consuming, expensive and laborious process. In this paper, we harness the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) to develop a fully automated method of extracting product ontologies, in the form of meronymies, from raw review texts. We demonstrate that the ontologies produced by our method surpass an existing, BERT-based baseline when evaluating using an LLM-as-a-judge. Our investigation provides the groundwork for LLMs to be used more generally in (product or otherwise) ontology extraction.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-short.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
423–433
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.34/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dekai Zhang, Simone Conia, and Antonio Rago. 2025. Meronymic Ontology Extraction via Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 423–433, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Meronymic Ontology Extraction via Large Language Models (Zhang et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.34.pdf