Acquiring Semantic Relations Using the Web for Constructing Lightweight Ontologies

Common techniques for acquiring semantic relations rely on static domain and linguistic resources, predefined patterns, and the presence of syntactic cues. We propose a hybrid approach which brings together established and novel techniques in lexical simplification, word disambiguation and association inference for acquiring coarse-grained relations between potentially ambiguous and composite terms using only dynamic Web resources. Our experiments using terms from two different domains demonstrate potential preliminary results.