From Linguistics to Ontologies - The Role of Named Entities in the Conceptualisation Process

Ontologies that have been built from texts can be associated with lexical information that is crucial for the semantic annotation of texts and all semantic search tasks. However, the entire pocess of building ontologies from texts cannot be fully automated and it is important to guide the knowledge engineer during the building process. This paper presents an enriched version of TERMINAE, which is a text-based methodology for ontology design. It combines a fact-based approach of modeling with the more traditional concept-centric one. We show that named entities can be used to enrich an existing ontology and to bootstrap the acquisition process. In other words, named entities are used for the conceptualisation of ontologies and not only for their population. This approach is illustrated on two use-cases based on policy documents and evaluated by measuring the Precision and Recall of the resulting ontologies with respect to pre-existing ontologies independently built by