Semi-Automatic Domain Ontology Creation from Text Resources

Analysts in various domains, especially intelligence and financial, have to constantly extract useful knowledge from large amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data. Keyword-based search, faceted search, question-answering, etc. are some of the automated methodologies that have been used to help analysts in their tasks. General-purpose and domain-specific ontologies have been proposed to help these automated methods in organizing data and providing access to useful information. However, problems in ontology creation and maintenance have resulted in expensive procedures for expanding/maintaining the ontology library available to support the growing and evolving needs of analysts. In this paper, we present a generalized and improved procedure to automatically extract deep semantic information from text resources and rapidly create semantically-rich domain ontologies while keeping the manual intervention to a minimum. We also present evaluation results for the intelligence and financial ontology libraries, semi-automatically created by our proposed methodologies using freely-available textual resources from the Web.