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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Ontological Annotation with WordNet</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Antonio Sanfilippo</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Stephen Tratz</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Michelle Gregory</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Alan Chappell</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Paul Whitney</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Christian Posse</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Patrick Paulson</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Bob Baddeley</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Ryan Hohimer</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Amanda White</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Antonio.Sanfilippo</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Stephen.Tratz, Michelle.Gregory, Alan.Chappell, Paul.Whitney, Christian.Posse, Patrick.Paulson, Bob.Baddeley, Ryan.Hohimer</addr-line>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Pacific Northwest National Laboratory</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>902 Battelle Blvd, Richland, PO Box 999, WA 99352</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="US">USA</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <fpage>27</fpage>
      <lpage>36</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>Semantic Web applications require robust and accurate annotation tools that are capable of automating the assignment of ontological classes to words in naturally occurring text (ontological annotation). Most current ontologies do not include rich lexical databases and are therefore not easily integrated with word sense disambiguation algorithms that are needed to automate ontological annotation. WordNet1 provides a potentially ideal solution to this problem as it offers a highly structured lexical conceptual representation that has been extensively used to develop word sense disambiguation algorithms. However, WordNet has not been designed as an ontology, and while it can be easily turned into one, the result of doing this would present users with serious practical limitations due to the great number of concepts (synonym sets) it contains. Moreover, mapping WordNet to an existing ontology may be difficult and requires substantial labor. We propose to overcome these limitations by developing an analytical platform that (1) provides a WordNet-based ontology offering a manageable and yet comprehensive set of concept classes, (2) leverages the lexical richness of WordNet to give an extensive characterization of concept class in terms of lexical instances, and (3) integrates a class recognition algorithm that automates the assignment of concept classes to words in naturally occurring text. The ensuing framework makes available an ontological annotation platform that can be effectively integrated with intelligence analysis systems to facilitate evidence marshaling and sustain the creation and validation of inference models.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>Introduction</title>
      <p>
        Ontological annotations identify real-world entities alongside properties and relations that characterize the
entities’ attributes and role in their textual context, with respect to a reference ontology. Adding these
annotations to unstructured or semi-structured data is a basic requirement to make Semantic Web
technologies work
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13 ref8">(Fensel et al. 2003, pp. 1-25; Klein et al. 2003)</xref>
        . For example, the availability of
ontologically annotated documents is crucial in enabling the shift from keyword-based queries and
navigation by predefined links to semantic-driven search and navigation behaviors that can be effectively
handled by automatic agents in Semantic Web applications
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref13 ref17">(Maedche et al. 2003; Broekstra et al. 2003)</xref>
        .
      </p>
      <p>Ontologies such as Cyc2 and SUMO3 therefore represent a pivotal element for Semantic Web
applications as they make available a knowledge representation language amenable to logical reasoning and
a dictionary of classes and relations that Web Services can use to describe content and reason about it.
However, linking words from naturally occurring text to entity and relationship classes in an ontology is
often problematic. Ontologies do not usually integrate a rich enough set of lexical instances that exemplify
the real-world entity and relationship tokens for their classes. Without such lexicons, gazetteers and
thesauri, the automation of the ontological annotation process is impossible as there is no way of
establishing how a word token (e.g. gun) can be related to an ontological class (e.g. #Weapon).</p>
      <p>Manual ontological annotation may provide a viable solution in some limited application domains, but it
is simply not a choice for applications which require processing large document collections. For example,
imagine adding semantic tags to each newswire that a news service receives daily or, even worse, tackling
the huge repositories of legacy newswire data. The daunting proportions of such an annotation task would
constitute a pre-emptive bottleneck under both time and cost considerations. Ultimately, automatic
ontological annotation is the only viable alternative. The minimal requirements to make such an alternative
available are
•
to establish reliable and cost-effective ways of linking lexical database entries to concept
classes in an ontology, and
• to use word sense disambiguation algorithms that reliably relate words in naturally occurring
text to those lexical database entries that have been linked to ontological classes.</p>
      <p>The goal of this paper is to show how these two requirements can be satisfied by
• leveraging the hierarchical structure of WordNet to transform WordNet into an ontology where a
relatively small number of top- and mid-level synonyms sets are selected as concept classes, with
all synonym sets defined as instances for such classes, and
• using WordNet-based word sense disambiguation algorithms to resolve ambiguities concerning
the assignment of a word token (e.g. conduct in the context conduct a nuclear program) to its
appropriate class (e.g. manage as opposed to behave, perform, or transmit).</p>
      <p>The ensuing framework provides an ontological annotation platform that can be effectively integrated with
intelligence analysis systems to facilitate evidence marshaling and sustain the creation and validation of
inference models.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Background</title>
      <p>Several formalizations of WordNet as an OWL ontology have been developed during the last few years4
and a WordNet Task Force has been created within the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and
Deployment Working Group5 to support the deployment of WordNet and similarly structured lexica in
RDF/OWL. One of the main problems with turning WordNet into an OWL ontology is the sheer number of
resulting concept classes. WordNet 2.0 has some 130,000 synonym sets. If each synonym set is formalized
as a concept class, the ensuing number of classes would just be too large and therefore impractical for a
real-world application. Moreover, it is not clear whether such a large number of lexical concept classes is
needed for applications such as semantic-based search and navigation. While it is important to have as wide
a lexical coverage as possible, such an objective can be simply achieved by linking a large number of word
senses (e.g. the 130,000 synonym sets in WordNet) to a more manageable number of concept classes.</p>
      <p>
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">Knight &amp; Luk (1994)</xref>
        provide one of the earliest attempts at linking a large lexical database such as
WordNet to an ontology derived from merging the PENMAN Upper Model and ONTOS
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">(see also Hovy
1998)</xref>
        . Such a mapping involves breaking WordNet into 200 hundred pieces and merging each manually
into the merged PENMAN Upper Model and ONTOS ontology.
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">Niles (2003)</xref>
        offers a more recent example
of the same endeavor by developing a methodology to link SUMO classes to WordNet synonym sets
manually; to date, the full WordNet 1.6 has been mapped to SUMO. Other examples are the
Cyc-toWordNet mapping that includes some 8,000 WordNet noun synsets, as reported in
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">O'Hara et al. (2003)</xref>
        and
the ongoing OntoWordNet Project at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology in the Italian National Research
Council6 (Cangemi et al., 2003).
      </p>
      <p>These must all be regarded as important achievements as they greatly enhance the utility of influential
ontologies. However, in spite of the considerable amount of work done, the accuracy of mapping
methodologies developed so far is yet unknown. Minimally, an evaluation of mapping results would
involve correlating choices made by several annotators for a representative subset of WordNet-SUMO
mappings in order to compute inter-annotators’ agreement. However, such an evaluation is yet to be
performed. Moreover, regardless of their reliability, the mapping methodologies developed so far cannot be
seen as providing a viable general solution for integrating ontologies with large lexical databases such as
WordNet. Because of the great number of synonym sets, the task of mapping WordNet to existing
ontologies is simply too costly and time-demanding to be carried out manually. In theory, the inheritance
structure of WordNet can be used to reduce the number of nodes that are considered as mapping
candidates, e.g. by selecting mapping candidates from the top layer of WordNet. In practice, this reduction
4 See the WordNet OWL ontology developed by the KID group http://taurus.unine.ch/knowler/wordnet.html.
5 http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/WNET/tf.html.
6 http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html.
requires a systematic and well-motivated methodology for establishing how far up the WordNet hierarchy
we need to go to select the best mapping candidates, and none of the approaches used in mapping WordNet
to existing ontologies to date have developed such a methodology.</p>
      <p>Developing an effective methodology for mapping WordNet to an ontology is the first step to make the
ontology useful. The next step is to establish which WordNet word sense is appropriate for a given word
token in context, in the event several choices are possible, so as to automate the assignment of ontological
classes to words in target documents. Suppose for example we are working with an ontology comprising
several possible event classes for the verb lemma conduct: #manage, #perform, #behave and
#transmit. If the ontology has already been mapped to WordNet, then each of these four classes would
be linked to a different WordNet sense for the lemma conduct
• #manage:{conduct#v#1, … }</p>
      <p>o direct the course of; manage or control; You cannot conduct business like this
• #perform:{conduct #v#2, … }
o lead, as in the performance of a composition; Barenboim conducted the Chicago
symphony for years
• #behave:{conduct#v#3, … }
o behave in a certain manner; They conducted themselves well during these difficult
times
• #transmit:{conduct#v#4, … }</p>
      <p>o transmit or serve as the medium for transmission; Many metals conduct heat.</p>
      <p>
        Automated ontological annotation in this case could leverage WordNet-based word sense disambiguation
algorithms to establish which of these four classes is appropriate for the lemma conduct in the context
support the right of Iran to conduct a nuclear program for peaceful purposes. Unfortunately, word sense
disambiguation is a difficult task to perform successfully. The best word sense disambiguation results in the
“all word” task for the Senseval3 evaluation7 are at 0.652 precision/recall (Snyder &amp; Palmer, 2004), with
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">Kohomban &amp; Lee (2005)</xref>
        reporting 0.661 for the same task and data set. Such results are only marginally
better than baseline heuristics such as choosing the most frequent word sense in WordNet (0.609), and are
just not reliable enough for most practical applications.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Defining a WordNet Ontology</title>
      <p>Our main objective in constructing a WordNet-based ontology is to select a manageable number of classes
that have sufficient conceptual depth to enable effective semantic inference and enough variety to yield the
widest lexical coverage. The work we have carried out to date is primarily concerned with verbs, but the
approach developed extends to other word classes in WordNet (nouns, adjectives and adverbs) in a
straightforward manner.</p>
      <p>In defining an event ontology based on WordNet, we selected verb synonym sets that were less specific
in meaning as event classes (e.g., {communicate#2, intercommunicate#2} vs. {gesticulate#1, gesture#1,
motion#1}). In doing so, we chose the more frequent member of the synonym set to name the class, e.g.
communicate#2 for the synonym set {communicate#2, intercommunicate#2}. The verbs in the synonym
sets chosen as event classes (e.g., communicate#2, intercommunicate#2) as well as their troponyms (e.g.,
{gesticulate#1, gesture#1, motion#1}, {grimace#1, make_a_face#1, pull_a_face#1}) were declared as
instances. The ontology is being developed as an OWL ontology8 using Protégé9 as the ontology editor
environment and Jena10 as the Semantic Web framework in which to implement the ontology, handle
reification, issue queries, and perform logical inference. An example of the resulting event ontology is
shown in Figure 1, where verb senses associated with the folder icon indicate event classes while those
associated with a bullet point are instances.</p>
      <p>
        To assess the specificity level of synonym sets, we used frequency counts for WordNet synonym sets
obtained from the British National Corpus (BNC) using the methodology established by
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">Resnik (1995)</xref>
        as
7 http://www.senseval.org/
8 http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref.
9 http://protege.stanford.edu.
10 http://jena.sourceforge.net..
implemented by Pedersen, Banerjee and Patwardhan11
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">(see also Pedersen et al. 2005, p. 15)</xref>
        . Since the BNC
is not annotated with WordNet word senses, concept counts were distributed across all possible senses of a
word. Frequencies of the verb senses were computed by taking the count of a verb and splitting it among its
senses and hypernyms; thus each sense and hypernym associated with a word type received an equal share
of each count. For example, if there are two senses of a word, then each of the concepts associated with
each sense is updated by 0.5 when we observe the word in a corpus.
      </p>
      <p>Verb synonym sets that have hyponyms and whose frequency counts were above a given threshold were
chosen as event classes. BNC frequency counts for verb synonym sets ranged from 0 to 2,060,415. We
chose a frequency cut-off value of 10,000. The chosen synonym sets tended to be in the top- to mid-layer of
the WordNet hierarchy and have a high number of hyponyms as they designated more general event
concepts. Following this method, we created 1077 event classes out of a total of 24,632 verb synonym sets.
386 top-level verb synonym sets were excluded because they either had no hyponyms or were below the
frequency cut-off value; 69 of these were mapped to other verb synonym sets using the “similar sense”
function in WordNet. The remaining 317 verb synonym sets are still out of our event ontology. These
represent rarer and more specific concepts, have very few or no hyponyms, and are therefore not well
suited as ontology classes. We are currently trying to find ways to integrate these verb synonyms in the
event ontology as instances for some of the 1077 event classes.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Automatic Word Class Recognition</title>
      <p>
        Our main objective in targeting the disambiguation of word classes as opposed to individual word senses is
to obtain results that significantly exceed current word sense disambiguation results. In our event ontology,
nearly 25,000 verb synonym sets are mapped into 1077 verb classes. Such mapping significantly reduces
the number of possible choices in assigning a concept to an ambiguous verb and should therefore simplify
the disambiguation challenge. This hypothesis is supported by previously reported good performance for
coarse grained word sense disambiguation systems
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">(Yarowsky 1992)</xref>
        .
      </p>
      <p>
        Our approach is based on a supervised classification approach and we use SemCor12 as training corpus.
Currently, we employ the OpenNLP MaxEnt implementation13 of the maximum entropy classification
algorithm
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">(Berger et al. 1996)</xref>
        to develop word class recognition models. For each verb lemma, we create a
11 http://search.cpan.org/dist/WordNet-Similarity/utils/BNCFreq.pl.
12 http://www.cs.unt.edu/~rada/downloads.html.
13 http://maxent.sourceforge.net/.
classifier that predicts which of the possible verb classes for the lemma is most likely according to the
context in which the lemma occurs.
      </p>
      <p>
        Following
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">Dang &amp; Palmer (2005)</xref>
        and
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">Kohomban &amp; Lee (2005)</xref>
        , we use contextual, syntactic and
semantic information to inform our verb class disambiguation system.
      </p>
      <p>
        • Contextual information is obtained by including three tokens on each side of the verb lemma
under analysis, not crossing sentence boundaries. Tokens included word tokens as well as
punctuation.
• Syntactic information includes grammatical dependencies (e.g. subject, object) and
morphosyntactic features such as part of speech, case, number and tense. We used the Connexor
parser14
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24 ref26">(Tapanainen and Järvinen, 1997)</xref>
        to extract syntactic information. A sample output of a
Connexor parse is given in Table 1.
• Semantic information includes named entity types (e.g. person, location, organization) and
hypernyms.
      </p>
      <p>
        o We used LCC’s Cicero Lite15 to extract named entity types, replacing the strings
identified as named entities (e.g., Joe Smith) with the corresponding entity type
(PERSON). We also substituted personal pronouns that unambiguously denote people
with the entity type PERSON.
o Hypernyms were retrieved from WordNet. Differently from
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">Dang &amp; Palmer (2005)</xref>
        ,
we only expanded the hypernym of sense 1 of lemmas, but we included the entire
hypernym chain (e.g. motor, machine, device, instrumentality, artifact, object, whole,
entity).
      </p>
      <p>A sample of the resulting feature vectors which were used both for training and recognition is given in
Table 2.</p>
      <p>ID#</p>
      <p>Word</p>
      <p>Lemma</p>
      <p>
        As the example in Table 2 indicates, combination of contextual, syntactic and semantic information
types results in a large number of features. Inspection of the training data reveals that some features may be
more important than others in establishing verb class assignment for each choice of verb lemma. We used a
feature selection procedure to reduce the full set of features to the feature subset that is most relevant to
verb class assignment for each verb lemma. This practice improved both the efficiency and effectiveness of
14 http://www.connexor.com/.
15 http://www.languagecomputer.com/solutions/information_extraction/cicero_lite.
our verb class disambiguation algorithm. The feature selection procedure we adopted consists in scoring
each potential feature according to a particular feature selection metric, and then take the best k features.
We choose the Information Gain selection metric, measuring the decrease in entropy when the feature is
given vs. when it is absent.
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">Yang and Pederson (1997)</xref>
        report that the Information Gain performed best in
their multi-class benchmarks, and
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">Foreman (2003)</xref>
        showed that it performed amongst the best for his
2class problems. In the future we intend to improve the feature selection process by developing a better
subset selection procedure based on Information Gain. The procedure will score subsets of features
simultaneously rather than individual features, thereby identifying high value feature combinations.
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Evaluation</title>
        <p>We evaluated our verb disambiguation algorithm in two distinct tasks: verb class disambiguation and verb
sense disambiguation. The first evaluation task demonstrates the utility of the disambiguation algorithm
with specific reference to the ontological annotation challenge. The second task provides an evaluation of
the disambiguation algorithm with reference to comparable results in the literature.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>Verb Class Disambiguation</title>
        <p>The goal of the verb class disambiguation task is to disambiguate a verb with reference to the verb classes
in our event ontology, rather than individual WordNet senses. The reason for collapsing verb senses into
verb classes is to simplify the disambiguation task by modeling coarser-grained categories to better support
ontological annotation. We used the SemCor corpus for this evaluation task. We randomly split the SemCor
into 80% training and 20% test sets. As described above, we create a classifier that predicts for each verb
lemma which of the possible verb classes is most likely for the lemma, according to the context in which
the lemma occurs. Our baseline is given by selecting the verb class linked to the sense for the lemma that
has the lowest word sense number (e.g. the highest frequency). In creating the classification model, we
ignored verb classes with 9 or fewer instances. The results shown in Table 3 demonstrate that we do
significantly better than the baseline. Moreover, 0.73 precision/recall seems to be a good result as verbs are
known to be harder to disambiguate. For example, Snyder and Palmer (2004) report that verbs scored the
lowest in inter-annotator agreement at 67.8% during the preparation of the evaluation data for Senseval3,
followed by nouns at 74.9% and adjectives at 78.5%.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>System</title>
        <p>Baseline
Our system</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-4">
        <title>Precision/Recall</title>
        <p>0.65
0.73</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-5">
        <title>Verb Sense Disambiguation</title>
        <p>
          Due to the uniqueness of the verb class disambiguation task, comparable results are currently not available
in the literature. In order to compare the performance of our system with that of other approaches, we
trained our algorithm for word sense disambiguation and used the Senseval3 English All Words task test
data. For training, we used verb instances in SemCor. If a verb occurring in the Senseval3 test data was not
present in the SemCor training set, we assumed the most frequent sense. Since our system was built using
WordNet 2.0 and Senseval3 uses WordNet 1.7.1, we mapped the output of our system to the corresponding
WordNet 1.7.1 senses. Using the scoring software and results files available from senseval.org, we
calculated the results for verbs relative to the two top performers in the Senseval3 English All Words task
for comparison purposes: GAMBL
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">(Decadt et al. 2004)</xref>
          and SenseLearner
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">(Mihalcea 2004)</xref>
          . The baseline
was calculated by assuming the most frequent sense for each verb.
        </p>
        <p>
          Table 4, below, provides the precision scores for baseline and the three systems—see Snyder &amp; Palmer
(2004) for a description of the scoring system. Overall, our disambiguation system yields better precision
and recall scores. To verify the statistical significance of these results, we used a standard proportions
comparison test
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">(see Fleiss 1981, p. 30)</xref>
          . According to this test, the precision of our system is significantly
better than the baseline (p=0.000765) and marginally better than SenseLerner (p=0.028). The test does not
detect a statistically significant difference between the scores reported by our system and GAMBL
(p=0.21).
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-6">
        <title>System</title>
        <p>Our system</p>
        <sec id="sec-4-6-1">
          <title>GAMBL</title>
          <p>SenseLearner</p>
        </sec>
        <sec id="sec-4-6-2">
          <title>Baseline</title>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-7">
        <title>Precision</title>
        <p>61%</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Related Work</title>
      <p>
        Considerable amount of effort has been devoted to the development of automatic annotation methodologies
for the Semantic Web during the last few years. Most of the approaches proposed exploit information
extraction techniques such as the recognition of named entities, relationships and events. For example,
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">Kogut &amp; Holmes (2001)</xref>
        present a system that generates DAML annotations for most proper nouns and
common relationships from web pages using AeroTextTM, a commercial information extraction tool.
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">Dingli
et al. (2003)</xref>
        and
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">Ciravegna &amp; Wilks (2003)</xref>
        propose an adaptive information extraction approach where
information from structured sources is used to train learning algorithms capable of automating the
annotation of domain specific web pages. These approaches work well for the semantic annotation of
named entities and for specific application domains where the vocabulary is somewhat limited and lexical
ambiguity is a relatively low concern. With more generic content (e.g. newswires), semantic annotation
requires additional tools and resources capable of providing large lexical coverage and a more fine grained
identification of word meaning. For example,
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref25">Witbrock et al. (2004)</xref>
        describe a system which uses a lexicon
of about 24,620 lexemes (nouns, verbs and adjectives) and 5,429 semantic translation patterns to produce
initial Cyc OWL annotations of arbitrary text documents automatically. The need to engage large scale
semantic knowledge resources such as WordNet and word sense disambiguation algorithms capable of
discriminating among contextually appropriate word meanings with reference to such resources is also
discussed in Buitelaar and Declerck (2004).
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Building an Ontological Annotation Environment for Intelligence Analysis</title>
      <p>
        We are currently using the word class disambiguation algorithm described in this paper to develop an
Ontological Annotation Tool (OAT) capable of supporting the extraction of evidence from document sets
for intelligence analysis applications such as the analysis of competing hypotheses
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">(Sanfilippo et al. 2005)</xref>
        .
As shown in Figure 2, OAT represents extracted evidence in the form of semantic graphs. These semantic
graphs are the combined result of an event extraction process based on dependency parsing with Connexor
and the word class disambiguation algorithm described in this paper. We use OWL (Web Ontology
Language) to represent semantic graphs. OWL facilitates the description of data classes in a way that
supports automated reasoning about the class membership of given instances. OWL class descriptions can
specify subsumption relationships and the properties associated with members of a given class.
Descriptions can also restrict class membership by property values.
Fig. 2. OAT sample.
      </p>
      <p>The results of parsing are semantically interpreted by the verb and entity classes (see Figure 3). The verb
class comprises 1077 verb classes defined in terms of the upper-level verb synonym sets selected from
WordNet and their subsumption relations, as described above in Defining a WordNet Ontology. Each
verb instance is tied to one or more instances of the entity class: these instances correspond to event
participants. Verb and entity instances have additional information that ties them to associated text within
source documents. Our entity class is currently based on the entity types supported by the Cicero Lite
named entity recognition system.</p>
      <p>After the initial text parsing is completed, verb disambiguation is performed to determine the correct
verb classification for events. This is recorded in the knowledge base by assigning the verb class to the
event instance. An example of the OWL output produced is shown in Table 5.</p>
      <p>OAT uses the Jena Ontology API to create models that describe the results of document parsing and
disambiguation. These models are viewable by the user. The granularity of events displayed can be
controlled by moving up and down the event hierarchy and by the types of restrictions placed on entity
instances tied to the events. The use of OWL and the Jena API will allow us to support user-defined
restrictions on the participants of events which are considered intelligence targets.
&lt;txtmark:cEvent
rdf:about="http://nvac.pnl.gov/sid/owl/data/libyagovernment.htm#convene_2913"&gt;
&lt;txtmark:dStartIndex rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#int"&gt;1169
&lt;/txtmark:dStartIndex&gt;
&lt;verbs:pWordNetSense rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#int"&gt;1
&lt;/verbs:pWordNetSense&gt;
&lt;verbs:pText rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string"&gt;convened in
&lt;/verbs:pText&gt;
&lt;rdf:type rdf:resource="http://nvac.pnl.gov/sid/owl/verbs#meet.8"/&gt;
...</p>
      <p>&lt;/txtmark:cEvent&gt;</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>Conclusions</title>
      <p>If ontologies are to support Semantic Web applications, a reliable system to relate words in naturally
occurring text to ontological classes must be made available. In this paper, we have shown that such a
system can be developed by defining a WordNet-based ontology that offers a manageable set of concept
classes, provides an extensive characterization of concept class in terms of lexical instances, and integrates
an automated class recognition algorithm. Our current verb class disambiguation algorithm demonstrates
strong performance, and better results yet are expected for noun and adjective classes. Once completed, our
WordNet-based ontology can be used as such or mapped to other ontologies to provide ontological
annotation functionality. Because of the substantial reduction of WordNet synonym sets considered as
mapping candidates, our approach can also reduce the costs and improve the results in the alignment of
WordNet with existing ontologies. The ensuing framework makes available an ontological annotation
platform that can be effectively integrated with intelligence analysis systems to facilitate evidence
marshaling and sustain the creation and validation of inference models.</p>
    </sec>
  </body>
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        </mixed-citation>
      </ref>
    </ref-list>
  </back>
</article>