Learning the Semantic Meaning of a Concept from the Web

Many researchers have used text classification method in solving the ontology mapping problem. Their mapping results heavily depend on the availability of quality exemplars used as training data. However, manual preparation of exemplars is costly. In this work, we propose to automatically extract text from web pages returned by a search engine. Search queries are formed according to the semantic information given in the ontology. We have implemented a prototype system that automates the entire process (from search query formation to conditional probability calculation) and conducted a series of experiments. We assessed the effectiveness of our approach by comparing the obtained conditional probabilities with human expectations. Our main contribution is that we explored the possibilities of utilizing web information for text classification based ontology mapping and made several valuable discoveries on its usefulness for future research.