Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) 2018

5-6 April 2018 | Singapore

Enriching Existing Ontology using Semi-Automated

Method
Md Jabed Hasan
Amna Islam Badhan Nafiz Ishtiaque Ahmed
Department of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science
American International University –
American International University – American International University –
Bangladesh
Bangladesh Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh
jabedhasan21@gmail.com
badhan2405@gmail.com cse.ishtiaque@gmail.com

Abstract—Ontology is a kind of philosophical study which is
dealing with nature being. Ontologies are extremely useful tools
for different purpose and various modalities in different areas
and communities. A common ontology is very effective in
sophisticated software engineering purpose. In realistic world
new meaningful words are always improving a language and to
enhance the most widely used ontologies it requires mapping. To
assure the quality manual mapping is used with some limitation.
Partial automated mapping may apply to extend ontology by
extracting and integrating knowledge from existing resources
more effectively. In this paper, we present a semi-automated
method, type of machine learning to enrich an existing ontology.
Moreover, the approach can save time and ensure the accuracy
that they need to serve.
Keywords—Ontology; mapping; semi-automated method and
machine learning
I. INTRODUCTION
Ontology the word defines a specification of a
conceptualization1. The use of background knowledge for
ontology matching is often a key factor for success,
particularly in complex and lexically rich domains such as the
life sciences [1]. It plays an important role in modern science
like, semantic web, machine translation and word sense
disambiguation to exploit lexical knowledge. Ontology
basically defines a collective vocabulary for researchers who
need to share information in a certain domain which include
machine-capable meanings of basic concepts in the domain
and relations amongst them2. The most effectual and widely
employed ontologies are still man-made. These include
WordNet, Cycor, Open-Cyc, and SUMO. As they are
manually assembled; these knowledge sources have the
advantage of satisfying the highest quality expectations.
Whatever, these knowledge sources are very costly to
assemble and continuous human effort required to keeping
them up to date. Language processing typically uses localized
knowledge in the ontology, looking up terms, handling
synonyms, and better understanding the context surrounding a
specific concept [2]. Some ontology structure can makes a
useful tool for language processing. We apply semi-automated
mapping approach to enrich of a particular ontology and try
computational external source to the target ontology.
WordNet is a free lexical database and it‟s publicly
available for download. It is very large and covers with
general lexical relation in English. WordNet‟s structure can
make it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural
language processing3. We apply semi-automated mapping to
enrich of ontology through mapping an external source to the
target ontology. Ontology which is consider as the pillars of
semantic web. The main thread of ontology is the study of
entities and their relations4 in the philosophical sense.
Ontology is seen as a key factor for enabling in-house
across different systems and semantic web applications.
Ontologies mapping are required for combining and
distributed different ontology‟s. Developing such ontology
mapping has been an important issue of recent ontology
research [7].
The semantic web relies heavily on the formal ontologies
that structure its underlying data for comprehensive and
transportable machine understanding. Ontology learning
greatly facilitates the construction of ontologies. The use of
ontologies to model the knowledge of specific domains
represents a key aspect for the integration of information
coming from different sources, for supporting collaboration
within virtual communities, for improving information
retrieval, and more generally, it is important for reasoning on
available knowledge. Ontology learning includes a number of
complementary disciplines [4]. Ontology feed on different
types of unstructured, semi structured, and fully structured
data to support semiautomatic ontology engineering [8].
Semantic annotation of data in the semantic web is the first
critical step to better search, integration and analytics over
heterogeneous data, semantic annotation of web services is an
equally critical first step to achieving the target. Finding the
right data for scientific research and application
development is still a challenge. One important goal of the
semantic web is to make the meaning of information explicit
through semantic mark-up, thus enabling more effective
access to knowledge contained in heterogeneous information
environments, such as the web. Semantic search plays an

3
1
www.ksl.stanford.edu http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
2 4
https://en.m.wikipedia.org http://opennlp.apache.org/

1|Page
978-1-5386-2056-4/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) 2018
important role in realizing this goal, as it promises to produce
precise answers to user‟s queries by taking advantage of the
availability of explicit semantics of information [5], [10].
Semantic Similarity relates to computing the similarity
between concepts which are not lexicographically similar.
Some of the most popular semantic similarity methods are
implemented and evaluated using WordNet as the reference
ontology [9].
We know that WordNet is a lexical database of English
words. Many more like Oxford English Dictionary,
Wiktionary (multilingual dictionary, a Wikipedia project)
Encyclopedia, Wordweb and Entitypedia are also some very
popular English dictionary. Do I get a word into all
dictionaries? The answer is may be no. because People invent
new words all the time. And all dictionaries don‟t update their
database at a time. For an example the word „Textpectation‟
cannot be found in WordNet but it exists in Knoworthy
database [3].
Our main objective of the thesis paper work is to enrich an
ontology with higher accuracy using a semi-automated
mapping approach. Using manually mapping we can achieve
high accuracy and noise identification but like other
ontologies the problem is low coverage and time consuming
and also required high cost. Besides, fully automation is
possible which achieve high coverage and minimal time with
the problem of low accuracy and noise unidentifiable. The
problem can be solved by semi-automated method which
having both manual and automatic approach at a time.
In this paper we propose a semi-automated method to
enrich knowledgebase with adding missing concepts in an
ontology. At the beginning of the paper, we refer some related
work and literature review covering with semi-automated
method, structure of WordNet, WordNet database, semantic
web search etc. then we analysis our method in several steps
with description. After that we evaluate our method and
compare result with other possible results elaborately. Before
end of the paper we discus about limitations of the paper and
further work which can be done in future.
II. RELATED WORK
When a higher accuracy is necessary, semi-automatic
approaches are preferable. Plenty of ideas have been generated
using this method. In this section, we briefly mention some
relevant work which is absolutely related with semi-automated
method.
FarsNet: a lexical ontology for the Persian language.
FarsNet is designed to contain a Persian WordNet with about
10000 synsets in its first phase and grow to cover verbs'
argument structures and their selection restrictions in its
second phase. The semi-automatic approach used to create the
first phase: the Persian WordNet [11].
Entitypedia is used to evaluate SAM as target ontology
and the 15,480 categories of YAGO that were directly mapped
to entity as external resource. Wikipedia was used as external
vocabulary. Developed at the University of Trento in Italy,
Entitypedia is a knowledge base with a precise split between
individuals, classes, attributes and relations and their
lexicalization as proper nouns and common nouns,
978-1-5386-2056-4/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
5-6 April 2018 | Singapore
respectively. Entitypedia is progressively extended by
collecting knowledge from several sources, including
WordNet [3].
III. DESCRIPTION
A. Semi-Automatic Method
Semi-automated means partially automated by both
manual and automatic system to achieve the target. Enrich
ontology can be possible by manually as well as semi-
automatic system. Though both can reach the same target but
every single step of procedure of them are different. If both
approaches can reach the same goal then a question may come
that why we use semi-automatic system? Yes, there are some
important reasons to choose semi-automatic approach.
There have some benefit of using manual approach. For
example a man-made ontology WordNet, to enrich it‟s
database by manually the benefits are its easy to find noise,
common noun and also find head for new common noun,
make relational tree with WordNet database. But constrains of
manual approach are time complexity, high assembly cost,
high quality assurance cost, low coverage etc. To overcome
from these constrains we suggest semi-automatic system
which can fulfill satisfactory level with high accuracy, low
cost and high coverage.
B. WordNet
WordNet was developed and is being maintained at the
Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University under
the supervision of Professor George A. Its knowledge base
and it can be downloaded and used free of cost and can also be
browse online.
C. Structure of WordNet
WordNet consists of three separate databases, one for
nouns, one for verbs and one for adjectives and adverbs and
all are placed not in alphabetical order but with order of
meaning. In Fig. 1, we have a relational tree and structure of
WordNet showing how one word related to others in the
WordNet database.
The current version available for online usage is 3.1which
was released in November 2012, is available to download. It
contains 155,287 words organized in 117,659 synsets for a
total of 206,941 word-sense pairs. The basic structure of
WordNet is synsets. WordNet covers more than 118,000
different word forms and more than 90,000 dissimilar word
senses In WordNet 3.0 there are 440 topics and domains [4].
Each of WordNet‟s 118, 000 synsets are linked with each
other. WordNet is unique because of its each form-meaning
pair. Means, a synset contains a brief definition and word form
with several different meanings is represented in many
different synsets.
About 17% of the words in WordNet are polysemous and
40% of the words are synonymous [3]. WordNet maintains the
word by groupings noun, verb, adjective, and adverb the open-
class words. It is assumed that the closed-class categories of
English around 300 prepositions, pronouns, and determiners
play a vital role in every parsing system and they are given no
semantic clarification in WordNet.
2|Page
 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) 2018
5-6 April 2018 | Singapore

Fig. 1. Relational Tree of WordNet.

Fig. 2. ISA relation among synsets.
Relation among words in WordNet is synonymy, e.g. the
words car and automobile. Synonyms words that mean the D. WordNet database
same concept which are interchangeable in many contexts are
The WordNet database is stored in an ASCII format
grouped into unordered sets (synsets). Encoded relation
consisting of eight files, two for each syntactic category.
among synsets is called ISA relation. The semantic relations
Additional files are used by the WordNet search code but are
that are included in WordNet are given below [3]:
not strictly part of the database [2]. WordNet only contains
 Synonymy (same-name) is a symmetric relation “open-class words” like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs,
between word forms. It‟s WordNet‟s elementary Prepositions, pronouns. Conjunction and articles cannot be
relation. found in WordNet.
 Antonymy (opposing-name) is also a symmetric E. Semantic Web Searching
semantic relation between word forms like synonymy, Semantic search is a data searching technique which
Significant in forming the meanings of adjectives and search in query and aims to not only find keywords, but to
adverbs. determine the intent and contextual meaning of the words
which is using for search. Semantic search provides more
 Hyponymy (sub-name) and hypernymy (super-name)
meaningful search results by evaluating and understanding the
inverse of hyponymy are transitive relations between
search phrase and finding the most relevant results in a
synsets. This semantic relation organizes the meanings
website, database or any other data repository5. For example,
of nouns into a hierarchical structure.
as shown in Fig. 3 the architecture of Semantic Web Search is
 Meronymy (part-name) and holonymy (whole-name) much difference of Normal Web Search6.
are composite semantic relations. WordNet can
distinguish component parts, substantive parts, and
member parts.
 Troponymy (manner-name) is for verbs what
hyponymy is for nouns, although the resulting
hierarchies are much shallower.
 Entailment relations between verbs are also implied in
WordNet.
While searching a new concept, it is very important to
identify a head along with other words. POS tagger (parts of
speech tagging) is comparatively an ideal way to find a new
concept with high accuracy. However, after finding a new
concept it has to be defined and make a relational tree with
other concept. Sometime concepts meaning or definition can
be different from head but it can relate to other concept which
is related with head. Here in Fig. 2, Graduate Course is not
directly related with head Organization but it related with
Course which is related with Work after Thing and this phase
is directly related with Organization.
Fig. 3. Architecture of semantic web search.

5
filosofie.unibuc.ro
6
semanticsage.blogspot.com

3|Page
978-1-5386-2056-4/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) 2018
5-6 April 2018 | Singapore
Semantic search is based on the context, substance, intent This system can merge words in semi-automatic approach
and concept of the searched phrase7. In the Semantic Web using JAWS and JWNL tools. Add and define new concept
community, semantic search is widely used to refer to a using our tool is shown in Fig. 5.
number of different categories of systems like, incorporates
location, synonyms of a term, current trends, word variations
and other natural language processing [6]. Semantic search
concepts are derived from various search algorithms and
methodologies, including keyword-to-concept mapping, graph
patterns and fuzzy logic.
IV. METHOD
In this paper we present a new method which is to search
for a new word or a new word‟s sense and merge that to the
related concept in WordNet. Searching process is applicable
for paragraph and sentence. We have to pick the common
nouns from those sentences and search those common nouns
in WordNet, if not exist then search the word to another
database or web source. If the word found in database or web
source then adjoins those words to the related concept in
WordNet database otherwise avoid those words as noise. The
way of our implementation:
Fig. 5. Create new concept using proposed system.
 Label: When searching procedure occur by a paragraph
or 5 to 6 sentences make label from these paragraph. V. EVALUATION AND RESULT
Label means pick a word from these sentences which
reflect a major influence in that passage. To evaluate our method we have tried various ontologies.
The aim of this step is to get an estimate idea about our target
 Summary: Searching with a big paragraph, make that and what we have found as result. In this process our method
paragraph in a summery version. takes approx. 2239ms to search a concept which is really very
faster than manual searching. Though manual searching is
 Define new concept: Define a new concept of
easier to identify a noise but it takes a larger time
searching, selecting head and merge with WordNet
comparatively partial mapping. And also the matter of higher
database.
accuracy and low cost, partial mapping can detect more and
 The identification of the head, which in turn is typically accurate head in minimal cost than manual mapping.
based on part of speech (POS) tagging, is an Thoroughly the mechanism performs properly to reduce the
approximated process with accuracy that varies noise rate of adding new concept and mapping it with
according to the tool and the dataset used to train it. WordNet database.
Some New concepts we found in this research and add A set of new word is examined which is not available in
WordNet database using our process like „Landform‟, WordNet. Table 1 describes the noise rate of suggested their
„Textpectation‟, „Futurologists‟, etc. In Fig. 4, a new concept conceptual definitions and accuracy rate of mapping the
is used, searching using our tool. concept with WordNet. Thereby we have tried 118 different
type of concept including some new concept and the result we
have found with time, cost and accuracy challenge are
compared and shown below in Fig. 6.

TABLE I. NOISE AND ACCURACY RATE FOR ADDING NEW WORD TO

WORDNET USING SEMI-AUTOMATED MAPPING
Noise rate of suggested
New Word Accuracy rate
conceptual definitions
Codec 30 % 98 %

Landform 20 % 100 %

Futurologists 0% 100 %

Rare diseases 0% 100 %

Sexologists 20 % 95 %
Fig. 4. Searching new concept.

7
blogspace.com

4|Page
978-1-5386-2056-4/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) 2018
5-6 April 2018 | Singapore

6 semi-automation can be a preferable technique to enrich

database through the mapping with WordNet ontology. As
ontologies support semantic web application so it‟s an
5 efficient system to merge words making possible. Because of
using semi-automated system, it can reduce the cost, time and
4 improve the results in the alignment of WordNet with existing
ontologies.
3
VIII. FUTURE WORK
2 Further research on adapting semi-automated approach
with more effective natural language processing (NLP)
1 algorithm can benefits enriching ontology with providing new
knowledge base concepts and constructing the accurate
0 definition of new word. Our approach can be further improved
Manual Mapping Semi-Automated Mapping by doing these future works:

time cost accuracy
Fig. 6. Difference between manual mapping and semi-automated mapping.
VI. DISCUSSION AND LIMITATION
The principal purpose of the study is to improve an
existing ontology and materialize a new mechanism which
provides high-ranking accuracy with least noise rate. Again
the study adjoins the missing concepts to ontology to improve
the knowledge base with semi-automated approach.
With this semi-automated approach; the WordNet
Database build accurate meaning of a newborn word and
makes the relationship with other knowledge base. The
extracted advantages from manual and automated approach
makes this semi-automated approach more effective for
enriching ontology. Acquiring high accuracy and minimum
noise rate the implemented work also clearly distinguish this
approach with manual and automated approach to enrich
ontology.
The study holds sundry limitations. At the context of
particularly unformatted articles; the existing tools that
perform the parsing and normalizing task from numerous
sources are still not adequate to achieve absolute accuracy.
Hence constructing the exact definition of a newborn word
from this mechanism occasionally required human
proficiency.
Like, when we got some new concept, we searched that
concept related information in Wikipedia to normalize (using
NLP) that concept from web content and built a relational tree
with other concept. But sometimes we didn‟t get that target
concept in Wikipedia, in that case we searched that content in
other domain manually. As our current implemented
application search targeted concept in Wikipedia (domain)
only, it search related information only Wikipedia.
When we were preparing Head concept list for targeted
new concept sentences, sometimes it added some head that‟s
were partially related to the new concept.
VII. CONCLUSION
World is getting easier day by day. It is difficult to update,
develop and maintain manmade ontologies like WordNet. So
 Alternative search: Add more website (domain) in our
current implemented application for alternative search
so that new concept relation can be search other
domain automatically.
 Enrich algorithm: To improve head concept list, we
have to enrich probable text parsing regular expression
and NLP algorithm.
 Alignment of verbs and nouns: The word which makes
a huge different meaning from noun to verb, make
these word align.
 Word Sense Alignment: Word Sense Alignment can be
defined as the identification of pairs of senses from two
(or more) lexical-semantic resources which denote the
same meaning, e.g.
o Be enamored or in love with.
o Feel love or affection for some one.
 Definition of alignment senses: The definitions
describe equivalent meanings allowing the alignment
of the two senses.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
First of all we would like to show our gratitude to the
Almighty, who gave us the effort to work on this project. We
want to thanks our honorable supervisor Bayzid Ashik
Hossain for guiding us. His profound knowledge in this field,
keen interest, patience and continuous support lead to the
completion of our work. His instructions have contributed
greatly in every aspect of the thesis.
REFERENCES
[1] D. Faria, C. Pesquita, E. Santos, I. F. Cruz and F. M. Couto, "Automatic
Background Knowledge Selection for Matching Biomedical
Ontologies," 2014.
[2] D. J. Berndt, J. A. McCart and S. L. Luther, "Using Ontology Network
Structure in Text Mining," pp. 41-45, 2010.
[3] V. Maltese and B. A. Hossain, "SAM: A TOOL FOR THE
SEMIAUTOMATIC MAPPING AND ENRICHMENT OF
ONTOLOGIES," 2012.
[4] S. Gella, C. Strapparava and V. Nastase, "MappingWordNet
Domains,WordNet Topics andWikipedia Categories to Generate
Multilingual Domain Specific Resources," 2014.
[5] L. D. Caro and G. Boella, "Automatic Enrichment of WordNet with
Common-Sense Knowledge," 2016.

5|Page
978-1-5386-2056-4/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) 2018
[6] K. Elbedweihy, S. N. Wrigley, F. Ciravegna, D. Reinhard and a. A.
Bernstein, "Evaluating Semantic Search Systems to Identify Future
Directions of Research," 2012.
[7] N. Choi, I. Song and H. Han, "A survey on ontology mapping," vol. 35,
pp. 34-41, 2006.
[8] M.GaetaF, OrciuoliP and Ritrovato, "Advanced ontology management
system for personalized e-Learning," vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 292-301, 2009.
5-6 April 2018 | Singapore
[9] G. Varelas, E. Voutsakis, P. Raftopulou, E. G. Petrakis and E. E. Milios,
"Semantic similarity methods in wordNet and their application to
information retrieval on the web," 2005.
[10] Y. Lei, V. Uren and E. Motta, "SemSearch: A Search Engine for the
Semantic Web," 2016.
[11] M. Shamsfard, A. Hesabi, H. Fadaei, N. Mansoory, A. Famian, S.
Bagherbeigi, E. Fekri, M. Monshizadeh and S. M. Assi, "Semi
Automatic Development of FarsNet; The Persian WordNet," 2010.

6|Page
978-1-5386-2056-4/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE