Extending a Lexical Ontology by a Combination of Distributional Semantics Signatures

Enrique Alfonseca, Suresh Manandhar

Abstract: Ontologies are a tool for Knowledge Representation that is now widely used, but the effort employed to build an ontology is high. We describe here a procedure to automatically extend an ontology such as WordNet with domain-specific knowledge. The main advantage of our approach is that it is completely unsupervised, so it can be applied to different languages and domains. Our experiments, in which several domain-specific concepts from a book have been introduced, with no human supervision, into WordNet, have been successful.