SeseiOnto: Interfacing NLP and ontology extraction

For many years, information retrieval tools have been used to try to solve the information overload problem which was accentuated by the coming of age of the World Wide Web. Some tools used Boolean search, others, natural language based processing (NLP). Ontology-based techniques were proposed to improve the quality of the search but none were widely adopted since they did not statistically enhance either the recall or the precision of the search. However when it comes to information extraction, they may be of significant help. Their integration in professional search engines has been rather slow, partially due to the fact that the ontology building process is time consuming. In this paper we describe the SeseiOnto software, which uses simple artificial intelligence techniques to improve information extraction and retrieval. To assist the NLP-based information retrieval on a corpus of documents, SeseiOnto employs an automatically generated ontology. Under our experiments, we found that SeseiOnto obtained results comparable to a traditional search engine, while providing a natural language interface to its user.