Using a lexical dictionary and a Folksonomy to automatically construct domain ontologies

We present and evaluate MKBUILD, a tool for creating domain-speci c ontologies. These resources, which we named Modular Knowledge Bases (MKBs), feature concepts and associations imported from existing large-scale knowledge resources, in particularWordNet and Wikipedia. The combination of WordNet's human-crafted taxonomy and Wikipedia's semantic associations between articles produces a highly connected resource. MKBs are utilised by a conversational agent op- erating on a small computational environment. We constructed several domains with our technique, and then conducted an evaluation by asking human subjects to rate the relevance of the concepts included in these ontologies on a scale from 0 to 2. The proposed methodology achieved precision values between 71% and 88% and recall between 37% and 95% in the evaluation depending on the interpretation of judgements scored with 1. The results are encouraging considering the cross-domain nature of the construction process and the di culty of representing concepts as opposed to terms.