AN INTERACTIVE TOOL FOR THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE BASES

Abstract

It is widely accepted that more knowledge means more intelligence. In many knowledge intensive applications, it is necessary to have extensive domain-specific knowledge in addition to general-purpose knowledge bases. This paper presents a methodology for discovering domain-specific concepts and relationships in an attempt to extend WordNet. The method was tested on five seed concepts selected from the financial domain: interest rate, stock market, inflation, economic growth, and employment. Queries were formed with each of these concepts and a corpus of 5000 sentences was extracted automatically from the Internet and TREC-8 corpora. On this corpus, the system discovered a total of 264 new concepts not defined in WordNet, of which 221 contain the seeds and 43 are other related concepts. The system also discovered 64 relationships that link these concepts with either WordNet concepts or with each other. The relationships were extracted with the help of 22 distinct lexico-syntactic patterns representing four semantic relations. It takes the system approximately 40 minutes per seed working in interactive mode to discover the new concepts and relationships on the 5000 sentence corpus.