Barbecued Opakapaka: Using Semantic Preferences for Ontology Population

This paper investigates the use of semantic preferences for ontology population. It draws on a new resource, the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs, which lists semantic categories expected in each syntactic slot of a verb pattern. Knowledge of semantic preferences is used to drive and control bootstrapped pattern extraction techniques on the EnClueWeb09 corpus with the aim of identifying common nouns belonging to twelve semantic types. Evaluation reveals that syntactic patterns perform better than lexical and surface patterns, at the same time raising issues about assessing ontology population candidates out of context.

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