In this paper, we present hierarchical relationbased latent Dirichlet
allocation (hrLDA), a data-driven hierarchical topic model for extracting
terminological ontologies from a large number of heterogeneous documents. In
contrast to traditional topic models, hrLDA relies on noun phrases instead of
unigrams, considers syntax and document structures, and enriches topic
hierarchies with topic relations. Through a series of experiments, we
demonstrate the superiority of hrLDA over existing topic models, especially for
building hierarchies. Furthermore, we illustrate the robustness of hrLDA in the
settings of noisy data sets, which are likely to occur in many practical
scenarios. Our ontology evaluation results show that ontologies extracted from
hrLDA are very competitive with the ontologies created by domain experts