Using Ontologies And The Web To Learn Lexical Semantics

In order to exchange knowledge, humans need to share a common lexicon of words as well as to access the world models underlying that lexicon. What is a natural process for a human turns out to be an extremely hard task for a machine: computers can’t represent knowledge as effectively as humans do, which hampers, for example, meaning disambiguation and communication. Applied ontologies and NLP have been developed to face these challenges. Integrating ontologies with (possibly multilingual) lexical resources is an essential requirement to make human language understandable by machines, and also to enable interoperability and computability across information systems and, ultimately, in the Web. This book explores recent advances in the integration of ontologies and lexical resources, including questions such as building the required infrastructure (e.g., the Semantic Web) and different formalisms, methods and platforms for eliciting, analyzing and encoding knowledge contents (e.g., multimedia, emotions, events, etc.). The contributors look towards next-generation technologies, shifting the focus from the state of the art to the future of Ontologies and Lexical Resources. This work will be of interest to research scientists, graduate students, and professionals in the fields of knowledge engineering, computational linguistics, and semantic technologies.

A comprehensive theory-based approach to the treatment of text meaning in natural language processing applications.

An edited collection focusing on the technology involved in enabling integration between lexical resources and semantic technologies.

Ontology Learning for the Semantic Web explores techniques for applying knowledge discovery techniques to different web data sources (such as HTML documents, dictionaries, etc.), in order to support the task of engineering and maintaining ontologies. The approach of ontology learning proposed in Ontology Learning for the Semantic Web includes a number of complementary disciplines that feed in different types of unstructured and semi-structured data. This data is necessary in order to support a semi-automatic ontology engineering process. Ontology Learning for the Semantic Web is designed for researchers and developers of semantic web applications. It also serves as an excellent supplemental reference to advanced level courses in ontologies and the semantic web.

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." —Tim Berners-Lee, Scientific American, May 2001 This authoritative guide shows how the Semantic Web works technically and how businesses can utilize it to gain a competitive advantage Explains what taxonomies and ontologies are as well as their importance in constructing the Semantic Web Companion Web site includes further updates as the framework develops and links to related sites

The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information. Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business. Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management (“Semantic Information Access”) and in the next generation of Web services. Semantic Web Technologies: Provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in Semantic Web research and key technologies. Explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve machine-interpretability. Describes methods for ontology learning and metadata generation. Discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and mediation. Illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and the telecommunication industry. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field will all find Semantic Web Technologies an essential guide to the technologies of the Semantic Web.

This publication advances the state-of-the-art in ontology learning by presenting a set of novel approaches to the semi-automatic acquisition, refinement and evaluation of logically complex axiomatizations. It has been motivated by the fact that the realization of the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee is still hampered by the lack of ontological resources, while at the same time more and more applications of semantic technologies emerge from fast-growing areas such as e-business or life sciences. Such knowledge-intensive applications, requiring large scale reasoning over complex domains of interest, even more than the semantic web depend on the availability of expressive, high-quality axiomatizations. This knowledge acquisition bottleneck could be overcome by approaches to the automatic or semi-automatic construction of ontologies. Hence a huge number of ontology learning tools and frameworks have been developed in recent years, all of them aiming for the automatic or semi-automatic generation of ontologies from various kinds of data. However, both the quality and the expressivity of ontologies that can be acquired by the current state-of-the-art in ontology learning so far have failed to meet the expectations of people who argue in favor of powerful, knowledge-intensive applications based on logical inference. This work therefore takes a first, yet important, step towards the semi-automatic generation and maintenance of expressive ontologies.

In the last decade, ontologies have received much attention within computer science and related disciplines, most often as the semantic web. Ontology Learning and Population from Text: Algorithms, Evaluation and Applications discusses ontologies for the semantic web, as well as knowledge management, information retrieval, text clustering and classification, as well as natural language processing. Ontology Learning and Population from Text: Algorithms, Evaluation and Applications is structured for research scientists and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science.

Perspectives on Ontology Learning brings together researchers and practitioners from different communities − natural language processing, machine learning, and the semantic web − in order to give an interdisciplinary overview of recent advances in ontology learning. Starting with a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical foundations of ontology learning methods, the edited volume presents the state-of-the-start in automated knowledge acquisition and maintenance. It outlines future challenges in this area with a special focus on technologies suitable for pushing the boundaries beyond the creation of simple taxonomical structures, as well as on problems specifically related to knowledge modeling and representation using the Web Ontology Language. Perspectives on Ontology Learning is designed for researchers in the field of semantic technologies and developers of knowledge-based applications. It covers various aspects of ontology learning including ontology quality, user interaction, scalability, knowledge acquisition from heterogeneous sources, as well as the integration with ontology engineering methodologies.