Dekai Zhang


2025

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Meronymic Ontology Extraction via Large Language Models
Dekai Zhang | Simone Conia | Antonio Rago
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

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.