Incremental formalization of document annotations through ontology-based paraphrasing

  • Authors:

  • Jim Blythe;Yolanda Gil

  • Affiliations:

  • USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA;USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

For the manual semantic markup of documents to become wide-spread, usersmust be able to express annotations that conform to ontologies (orschemas) that have shared meaning. However, a typical user is unlikelyto be familiar with the details of the terms as defined by the ontology authors. In addition, the idea to be expressed may not fit perfectly within a pre-defined ontology. The ideal tool should help users find apartial formalization that closely follows the ontology where possiblebut deviates from the formal representation where needed. We describe animplemented approach to help users create semi-structured semantic annotations for a document according to an extensible OWL ontology. In our approach, users enter a short sentence in free text to describe allor part of a document, and the system presents a set of potential paraphrases of the sentence that are generated from valid expressions inthe ontology, from which the user chooses the closest match. We use a combination of off-the-shelf parsing tools and breadth-first search of expressions in the ontology to help users create valid annotations starting from free text. The user can also define new terms to augmentthe ontology, so the potential matches can improve over time.