Surely most textbooks include an Index, and a table of contents,
both of which constitute an ontology of sorts - so yuo could aim to
devise a program which recreates a textbook's Index and Table of
Contents, and evaluate against the originals. ToC should be failry
easy, esp if the textbook is strcutured into names chapters, sections,
subsections... index is harder, trying to identify subject-specific
key terms.
Furthermore, if you managed to build a system for generating indexes for
textbooks, this would probably be quite useful! (perhaps more
practically/commercially useful than other "ontology-learning" systems!)
Eric Atwell, Leeds University
On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, D.G.Damle wrote:
> I am trying to learn ontologies from text. Evaluation is a problem,
> since if you ask people to read the text and then to evaluate the
> automatically generated ontology; every reader's concept structure may
> be different. The variation amongst readers may be too great!
>
> It is also difficult to have such an ontology marked by domain experts.
> What the domain experts know about the domain may not be reflected in
> the text and so Rrecall is particularly difficult. Also, evaluators may
> not be willing to read large texts.
>
> Does the ontology defined by the author(s) of a large text constitute a
> more objective yardstick? Do authors have a list of concepts and
> possibly some notion of structure about the text they set out to create?
> (I am thinking particularly of textbooks). Do any authors commit
> something like a concept structure to paper or a computer documentbefore
> they write the text? Alternatively, is it likely that an author could
> retrospectively construct such a plan, notwithstanding the issues of
> memory lapses etc.
>
> Do any authors have such plans and the texts they wrote using those
> plans in an electronic form which they would be happy to make available
> for research? What do list members who write textbooks, do?
>
> Do list members have any views about this evaluation methodology?
>
> Dileep Damle
>
> PhD student
> Open University
> Milton Keybws
>
-- Eric Atwell, Senior Lecturer, Language research group, School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT, England TEL: +44-113-3435430 FAX: +44-113-3435468 http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric
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