Dealing with Large Corpora for Ontology Population

Multilingual ontology population from texts, i.e. addition of new terms in an ontology, requires a suitable parallel or comparable corpus. In this paper, we aim to check whether the corpus selected for our project suits the ontology we want to populate. The corpus for ontology population should not only reflect a specific domain and have a sufficient volume of data, as discussed in (Delpech et al., 2012), but also suit the initial ontology. Using an existing corpus can be an efficient solution used in many projects (Cimiano, 2006; Bouamor, 2014; Pinnis, 2014). However this option is less reliable in the case of a large multi-domain corpus and an ontology which might not cover all the domain concepts. The need for suitability between text corpora and ontology is expressed by (Aussenac-Gilles et al., 2006) who underlined the importance of text type in the corpus, the ontology application, the validation criteria and set up. The text layout can also play an important role: some projects aim to use extralinguistic information for ontology population (Kamel et al., 2013), while others concentrate on the comprehensiveness of the text (Faber et al., 2006). In this case study, we set up an experiment checking whether a corpus is suitable for ontology population, based on the example of the large parallel (English, French and German) corpus PatTR1 (Wäschle and Riezler, 2012) and the EcoLexicon2 terminology knowledge base which we use in our project.