Ontology Building using Parallel Enumerative Structures

The semantics of a text is carried by both the natural language it contains and its layout. As ontology building processes have so far taken only plain text into consideration, our aim is to elicit its textual structure. We focus here on parallel enumerative structures because they bear implicit or explicit hierarchical relations, they have salient visual properties, and they are frequently found in corpora. We have defined a process which identifies them in a text, translates them into ontology structures and finally links such structures to the concepts of an existing ontology. We have assessed this process on Wikipedia encyclopaedic articles as they are rich in definitions and statements, and contain many enumerations. The many ontology structures we have obtained are thus used to enrich an ontology which we had automatically built from database specification documents.