Ontology Learning and Population from Text2006

Standard formalisms for knowledge representation such as RDFS or OWL have been recently developed by the semantic web community and are now in place. However, the crucial question still remains: how will we acquire all the knowledge available in people's heads to feed our machines? Natural language is THE means of communication for humans, and consequently texts are massively available on the Web. Terabytes and terabytes of texts containing opinions, ideas, facts and information of all sorts are waiting to be mined for interesting patterns and relationships, or used to annotate documents to facilitate their retrieval. A semantic web which ignores the massive amount of information encoded in text, might actually be a semantic, but not a very useful, web. Knowledge acquisition, and in...