From linguistic patterns to ontology structures

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the research on linguistic patterns focusing on the subclassOf relation for the semi-automatic construction of ontologies. Taking as a starting point those ontological structures corresponding to consensual modelling solutions, which are known as Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs), we identified the linguistic patterns that convey the relation captured in ODPs as Lexico-Syntactic Patterns (LSPs) and included them in an LSP-ODP pattern repository. LSPs will permit novice users the conversion of the domain field they want to model into an ontological structure. In the present contribution, the language of classification in Spanish is studied in order to collect the most common ways of verbally expressing the subclassOf relation. Then, the topology of the most common classification patterns is analysed to discover the type of ontological knowledge provided, i.e. which concept relation, and the two essential features in ontology knowledge: exhaustiveness and disjointness

Ontologies and Information Extraction

This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which becomes a major application domain for IE

Discourse Analysis: varieties and methods

This paper presents and analyses six key approaches to discourse analysis, including political discourse theory, rhetorical political analysis, the discourse historical approach in critical discourse analysis, interpretive policy analysis, discursive psychology and Q methodology. It highlights differences and similarities between the approaches along three distinctive dimensions, namely, ontology, focus and purpose. Our analysis reveals the difficulty of arriving at a fundamental matrix of dimensions which would satisfactorily allow one to organize all approaches in a coherent theoretical framework. However, it does not preclude various theoretical articulations between the different approaches, provided one takes a problem-driven approach to social science as one?s starting-point