A platform for semantic annotations and ontology population using conditional random fields

Ontologies are widely used for organising and sharing knowledge. But elaborating these resources is a heavy and time-consuming task. This paper is two-fold: it describes EADS DCS text-mining platform, in particular, its service to annotate documents with semantic tags and it presents its extension for incremental learning of ontologies. Domain experts are assisted in the ontology population task by recent machine learning techniques (i.e. conditional random fields). Comparisons are made between annotations from the ontology and from a trained CRF model, so as to detect candidate instances. An iterative process controlled by the experts results in knowledge discovery and constitution of an accurate ontology.