Coupling semantic and statistical techniques for dynamically enriching web ontologies

With the development of the Semantic Web technology, the use of ontologies to store and retrieve information covering several domains has increased. However, very few ontologies are able to cope with the ever-growing need of frequently updated semantic information or specific user requirements in specialized domains. As a result, a critical issue is related to the unavailability of relational information between concepts, also coined missing background knowledge. One solution to address this issue relies on the manual enrichment of ontologies by domain experts which is however a time consuming and costly process, hence the need for dynamic ontology enrichment. In this paper we present an automatic coupled statistical/semantic framework for dynamically enriching large-scale generic ontologies from the World Wide Web. Using the massive amount of information encoded in texts on the Web as a corpus, missing background knowledge can therefore be discovered through a combination of semantic relatedness measures and pattern acquisition techniques and subsequently exploited. The benefits of our approach are: (i) proposing the dynamic enrichment of large-scale generic ontologies with missing background knowledge, and thus, enabling the reuse of such knowledge, (ii) dealing with the issue of costly ontological manual enrichment by domain experts. Experimental results in a precision-based evaluation setting demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.