A concept–relationship acquisition and inference approach for hierarchical taxonomy construction from tags

Taxonomy construction is a resource-demanding, top–down, and time consuming effort. It does not always cater for the prevailing context of the captured information. This paper proposes a novel approach to automatically convert tags into a hierarchical taxonomy. Folksonomy describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords or tags to shared content. Using folksonomy as a knowledge source for nominating tags, the proposed method first converts the tags into a hierarchy. This serves to harness a core set of taxonomy terms; the generated hierarchical structure facilitates users’ information navigation behavior and permits personalizations. Newly acquired tags are then progressively integrated into a taxonomy in a largely automated way to complete the taxonomy creation process. Common taxonomy construction techniques are based on 3 main approaches: clustering, lexico-syntactic pattern matching, and automatic acquisition from machine-readable dictionaries. In contrast to these prevailing approaches, this paper proposes a taxonomy construction analysis based on heuristic rules and deep syntactic analysis. The proposed method requires only a relatively small corpus to create a preliminary taxonomy. The approach has been evaluated using an expert-defined taxonomy in the environmental protection domain and encouraging results were yielded.