Deriving Concept Hierarchies from Text by Smooth Formal Concept Analysis

We present a novel approach to the automatic acquisition of taxonomies or concept hierarchies from texts based on Formal Concept Analysis. Our approach is based on the assumption that verbs pose strong selectional restrictions on their arguments. The conceptual hierarchy is then built on the basis of the inclusion relations between the extensions of the selectional restrictions of all the verbs, while the verbs themselves provide intensional descriptions for each concept. We formalize this idea in terms of FCA and show how our approach can be used to acquire a concept hierarchy for the tourism domain out of texts. In particular, we focus on the question if smoothing techniques have an influence on the quality of the generated concept hierarchies. We evaluate our approach by considering an already existing ontology for this domain.