Instance-Driven Discovery of Ontological Relation Labels

An approach is presented to the automatic discovery of labels of relations between pairs of ontological classes. Using a hyperlinked encyclopaedic resource, we gather evidence for likely predicative labels by searching for sentences that describe relations between terms. The terms are instances of the pair of ontological classes under consideration, drawn from a populated knowledge base. Verbs or verb phrases are automatically extracted, yielding a ranked list of candidate relations. Human judges rate the extracted relations. The extracted relations provide a basis for automatic ontology discovery from a non-relational database. The approach is demonstrated on a database from the natural history domain.