Language agnostic dictionary extraction

Abstract

Ontologies are dynamic artifacts that evolve both in structure and content. Keeping them up-to-date is a very expensive and critical operation for any application relying on semantic Web technologies. In this paper we focus on evolving the content of an ontology by extracting relevant instances of ontological concepts from text. The novelty of this work is that we propose a technique which is (i) completely language independent, (ii) combines statistical methods with human-in-the-loop and (iii) exploits Linked Data as bootstrapping source. Experiments on a publicly available parallel medical corpus show comparable performances regardless of the chosen language.