New (old) paper: “On the use of correspondence analysis to learn seed ontologies from text”
Here is another work done in the last year(s), and here is its story. In January, 2009, as soon as I finished with my PhD, I've been put in contact with a company searching for people to implement Fionn Murtagh's Correspondence Analysis methodology for the automatic extraction of ontologies from text. After clarifying my position about it (that is, that what was extracted were just taxonomies and that I thought that the process should have become semi-automatic), I started a 10 months project in my university, officially funded by that company. I say "officially" because, while I regularly received my paycheck each month from the university, the company does not seem to have payed yet, after almost two years from the beginning of the project. Well, I guess they are probably just late and I am sure they will eventually do that, right?
By the way, the project was interesting even if it started as just the development of someone else's approach. The good point is that it provided us some interesting insights about how ontology extraction from text works in practice, what are the real world problems you have to face and how to address them. And the best thing is that, after the end of the project, we found we had enough enthusiasm (and most important a Master student, Fabio Marfia... thanks! ;)) to continue that.
Fabio has done a great work, taking the tool I had developed, expanding it with new functionalities, and testing them with real world examples. The outcome of our work, together with Fabio's graduation of course (you can find material about his thesis here), is the paper "On the use of correspondence analysis to learn seed ontologies from text" we wrote together with Matteo Matteucci. You can find the paper here, while here you can download its poster.
The work is not finished yet: there are still some aspects of the project that we would like to delve deeper into and there are still things we have not shared about it. It is just a matter of time, however, so stay tuned ;-)