Semantic web and natural language in online discussion forums

  • Authors:
  • Johann Mitlöhner

  • Affiliations:
  • Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Electronic commerce
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Personal weg pages, blogging services and discussion forums have gained widespread acceptance among casual Internet users to communicate their views and preferences across diverse areas of topics. Unfortunately, since these contributions are written in free-form natural language it is difficult and error-prone to automatically extract much more than a classification of postings into subject categories; the statements contained in the individual sentences of the text remain largely inaccessible to automated analysis. The RDF Resource Description Framework provides sophisticated vocabulary for semantic markup, however, due its complexity it is not suitable for casual users. In this work an approach similar to the historical evolution of trade languages among different native speakers is suggested that aims at merging RDF and natural language into simple community-specific web pidgin languages interactively evolving based on the input of participating users.