Creation of a bottom-up corpus-based ontology for Italian Linguistics

This paper describes the steps of construction of a shallow lexical ontology of Italian Linguistics in Italian, set to be used by a meta-search engine for query refinement. The ontology was constructed with the software Protege 4.0.2 and encoded in OWL format; its construction has been carried out following the steps described in the well-known Ontology Learning From Text (OLFT) layer cake. The starting point was the automatic term extraction from a corpus of web documents concerning the domain of interest (304,000 words); as regards corpus construction, we describe the main criteria of the web documents selection and its critical points, concerning the definition of user profile and of degrees of specialisation. We then describe the process of term validation and construction of a glossary of terms of Italian Linguistics; afterwards, we outline the identification of synonymic chains and the main criteria of ontology design: top classes of ontology are Concept (containing taxonomy of concepts) and Term (containing terms of the glossary as instances), while concepts are linked through part-whole and involved-role relation, both borrowed from Wordnet. Finally, we show some examples of the application of the ontology for query refinement.