An overview of methods and tools for ontology learning from texts

Abstract

Ontology learning aims at reducing the time and efforts in the ontology development process. In recent years, several methods and tools have been proposed to speed up this process using different sources of information and different techniques. In this paper, we have reviewed 13 methods and 14 tools for semi-automatically building ontologies from texts and their relationships with the techniques each method follows. The methods have been grouped according to the main techniques followed and three groups have been identified: one based on linguistics, one on statistics, and one on machine learning. Regarding the tools, the criterion for grouping them, which has been the main aim of the tool, is to distinguish what elements of the ontology can be learned with each tool. According to this, we have identified three kinds of tools: tools for learning relations, tools for learning new concepts, and assisting tools for building up taxonomies.