Semi-Automatic Ontology Extension Using Spreading Activation

This paper describes a system to semi-automatically extend and refine ontologies by mining textual data from the Web sites of international online media. Expanding a seed ontology creates a semantic network through co-occurrence analysis, trigger phrase analysis, and disambiguation based on the WordNet lexical dictionary. Spreading activation then processes this semantic network to find the most probable candidates for inclusion in an extended ontology. Approaches to identifying hierarchical relationships such as subsumption, head noun analysis and WordNet consultation are used to confirm and classify the found relationships. Using a seed ontology on "climate change" as an example, this paper demonstrates how spreading activation improves the result by naturally integrating the mentioned methods.