Extracting domain knowledge from tables of contents

Knowledge in textual form is always presented as visually and hierarchically structured units of text, which is particularly true in the case of academic texts. One research hypothesis of the ongoing project Knowledge ordering in texts— text structure and structure visualisations as sources of natural ontologies1 is that the textual structure of academic texts effectively mirrors essential parts of the knowledge structure that is built up in the text. The structuring of a modern dissertation thesis (e.g. in the form of an automatically generated table of contents tocs), for example, represents a compromise between requirements of the text type and the methodological and conceptual structure of its subject-matter. The aim of the project is to examine how visual-hierarchical structuring systems are constructed, how knowledge structures are encoded in them, and how they can be exploited to automatically derive ontological knowledge for navigation, archiving, or search tasks. The idea to extract domain concepts and semantic relations mainly from the structural and linguistic information gathered from tables of contents represents a novel approach to ontology learning.