How to classify domain entities into top-level ontology concepts using large language models

Abstract

Classifying domain entities into their respective top-level ontology concepts is a complex problem that typically demands manual analysis and deep expertise in the domain of interest and ontology engineering. Using an efficient approach to classify domain entities enhances data integration, interoperability, and the semantic clarity of ontologies, which are crucial for structured knowledge representation and modeling. Based on this, our main motivation is to help an ontology engineer with an automated approach to classify domain entities into top-level ontology concepts using informal definitions of these domain entities during the ontology development process. In this context, we hypothesize that the informal definitions encapsulate semantic information crucial for associating domain entities with specific top-level ontology concepts. Our approach leverages state-of-the-art language models to explore our hypothesis across multiple languages and informal definitions from different knowledge resources. In order to evaluate our proposal, we extracted multi-label datasets from the alignment of the OntoWordNet ontology and the BabelNet semantic network, covering the entire structure of the Dolce-Lite-Plus top-level ontology from most generic to most specific concepts. These datasets contain several different textual representation approaches of domain entities, including terms, example sentences, and informal definitions. Our experiments conducted 3 study cases, investigating the effectiveness of our proposal across different textual representation approaches, languages, and knowledge resources. We demonstrate that the best results are achieved using a classification pipeline with a K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) method to classify the embedding representation of informal definitions from the Mistral large language model. The findings underscore the potential of informal definitions in reflecting top-level ontology concepts and point towards developing automated tools that could significantly aid ontology engineers during the ontology development process.