Developing Taxonomies

Ontologies, Taxonomies, Thesauri: Learning from Texts, by Christopher Brewster and Yorick Wilks; Department of Computer Science, University of She±eld, She±eld, UK (2004)

On automating the creation of taxonomies:

"This paper takes the approach that, given the `info-smog' we live in (AKT 2001), hand-crafting is impractical and undesirable. While it is still a major research challenge to construct ontologies entirely automatically, the current tools available from the Natural Language Processing community make it possible to automate the task to a large extent and reduce manual input to where it makes the most qualitative di®erence. In Section 2, we describe discuss in greater detail the problem of manually constructing ontologies and argue for the use of text corpora as the main source of knowledge. In Section 3, we present a number of criteria as a guide for the method that need to be used for the automation of ontology construction. In Section 4, we present a number of methods for constructing ontologies from texts based on the criteria presented. Section 5 considers how to bridge the gap between the implicit knowledge assumed by a given text and the actual explicit knowledge present in the texts."