Using a lexical dictionary and a folksonomy to automatically construct domain ontologies

We present and evaluate MKBUILD , a tool for creating domain-specific ontologies. These ontologies, which we call Modular Knowledge Bases (MKBs), contain concepts and associations imported from existing large-scale knowledge resources, in particular WordNet and Wikipedia. The combination of WordNet's human-crafted taxonomy and Wikipedia's semantic associations between articles produces a highly connected resource. Our MKBs are used by a conversational agent operating in a small computational environment. We constructed several domains with our technique, and then conducted an evaluation by asking human subjects to rate the domain-relevance of the concepts included in each MKB on a 3-point scale. The proposed methodology achieved precision values between 71% and 88% and recall between 37% and 95% in the evaluation, depending on how the middle-score judgements are interpreted. The results are encouraging considering the cross-domain nature of the construction process and the difficulty of representing concepts as opposed to terms.