Ontology learning

Ontology learning , ontology extraction, ontology generation, or ontology acquisition, is a subtask of information extraction. The goal of ontology learning is to automatically extract relevant concepts and relations from a given corpus or other kinds of data sets. Compared to terminology extraction, ontology learning focuses more on relation extraction.

Typically, approaches to automatic ontology learning make use of linguistic processors (part of speech tagging, phrase chunking) to extract concepts and relations, and statistical techniques to extract relation signatures. For instance, these approaches try to detect that "to eat" denotes a relation between a concept denoted by "animal" and a concept denoted by "food".