TextOntoEx: Automatic ontology construction from natural English text

Most of existing ontologies construction tools support construction of ontological relations (e.g., taxonomy, equivalence, etc.) but they do not support construction of domain relations, non-taxonomic conceptual relationships (e.g., causes, caused by, treat, treated by, has-member, contain, material-of, operated-by, controls, etc.). Domain relations are found mainly in text sources. TextOntoEx constructs ontology from natural domain text using semantic pattern-based approach. TextOntoEx is a chain between linguistic analysis and ontology engineering. TextOntoEx analyses natural domain text to extract candidate relations and then maps them into meaning representation to facilitate constructing ontology. The paper explains this approach in more details and discusses some experiments on deriving ontology from natural text. 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.