Intelligent E‐Learning Systems: Automatic Construction of Ontologies

During the last years a new generation of Intelligent E‐Learning Systems (ILS) has emerged with enhanced functionality due, mainly, to influences from Distributed Artificial Intelligence, to the use of cognitive modelling, to the extensive use of the Internet, and to new educational ideas such as the student‐centered education and Knowledge Management. The automatic construction of ontologies provides means of automatically updating the knowledge bases of their respective ILS, and of increasing their interoperability and communication among them, sharing the same ontology. The paper presents a new approach, able to produce ontologies from a small number of documents such as those obtained from the Internet, without the assistance of large corpora, by using simple syntactic rules and some semantic information. The method is independent of the natural language used. The use of a multi‐agent system increases the flexibility and capability of the method. Although the method can be easily improved, the results...