Ontology Learning from Text: An Overview

The volume presents current research in ontology learning, addressing three perspectives: methodologies that have been proposed to automatically extract information from texts and to give a structured organization to such knowledge, including approaches based on machine learning techniques; evaluation methods for ontology learning, aiming at defining procedures and metrics for a quantitative evaluation of the ontology learning task; and finally application scenarios that make ontology learning a challenging area in the context of real applications such as bio-informatics.

According to the three perspectives mentioned above, the book is divided into three ections, each including a selection of papers addressing respectively the methods, the applications and the evaluation of ontology learning approaches. However, all selected papers pay considerably attention to the evaluation perspective, as this was a central topic of the ECAI 2004 workshop out of which most of the papers in this volume originate.