An Approach for Automatic Ontology Enrichment from Texts

The automatic ontology enrichment consists of automatic knowledge extraction from texts related to a domain of discourse in the aim to enrich automatically an initial ontology of the same domain. However, the passage, from a plain text to an enriched ontology requires a number of steps. In this paper, we present a three steps ontology enrichment approach. In the first step, we apply natural language processing techniques to obtain tagged sentences. The second step allows us to reduce each extracted sentence to an SVO (Subject, Verb, and Object) sentence, supposed to preserve main information carried by the original sentence(s) from which it is extracted. Finally, in the third step, we proceed to enrich an initial ontology built manually by adding extracted terms in the generated SVO as new concepts or instances of concepts and new relations. To validate our approach, we have used “Phytotherapy" domain because of the availability of related texts on the WWW and also because its usefulness for pharmaceutical industry. The first results obtained, after experiments on a set of different texts, testify the performance of the proposed approach.