Evaluating techniques for learning non-taxonomic relationships of ontologies from text

Learning non-taxonomic relationships is a sub-field of Ontology Learning that aims at automating the extraction of these relationships from text. Several techniques have been proposed based on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. However just like for other techniques for Ontology Learning, evaluating techniques for learning non-taxonomic relationships is an open problem. Three general proposals suggest that the learned ontologies can be evaluated in an executable application or by domain experts or even by a comparison with a predefined reference ontology. This article proposes two procedures to evaluate techniques for learning non-taxonomic relationships based on the comparison of the relationships obtained with those of a reference ontology. Also, these procedures are used in the evaluation of two state of the art techniques performing the extraction of relationships from two corpora in the domains of biology and Family Law. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.