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Tech Report kmi-01-08 Abstract


Template-Driven Information Extraction for Populating Ontologies
Techreport ID: kmi-01-08
Date: 2001
Author(s): Maria Vargas-Vera, John Domingue, Yannis Kalfoglou, Enrico Motta and Simon Buckingham-Shum
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We address the integration of information extraction (IE) and ontologies. In particular, using an ontology to aid the IE process, and using the IE results to help populate the ontology. We perform IE by means of domain specific templates and the lightweight use of Natural Languages Processing techniques (NLP). Our main goal is to learn information from text by the use of templates and in this way to alleviate the main bottleneck in creating knowledge-base systems that is ``the extraction of knowledge''. Our domain of study is ``KMi Planet'', a Web-based news server that helps to communicate relevant information between members in our institute [Domingue and Scott, 1999]. The raw input consists of e-mailed stories written by members of the laboratory. The main goals of our system are to classify the story, obtain the relevant objects within the story, deduce the relationships between them, and to populate the ontology. Furthermore, we aim to do this with minimal help from the user.

Publication(s):

Submitted to the IJCAI'01 Workshop on Ontology Learning (OL-2001), Seattle, USA, August 4, 2001.
 
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"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" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.