Research >> Tools

Resource Acquisition

Acquisition of language and knowledge resources is one of the central tasks in ILIT’s R&D. Testing theories and building applications depends on the availability of broad-coverage resources. In particular, ontological semantics calls for ontologies, lexicons and onomasticons, syntactic and morphological grammars and fact repositories as its basic knowledge sources

Machine-aided acquisition

Knowledge acquisition is supported by computer aids that combine graphical user interfaces, database management support and user support in terms of the various help functions. The Knowledge Base Acquisition Editor (KBAE) in Ontosem, the most current implementation of ontological semantics, is an example of such a system. Most of practical knowledge acquisition systems, including KBAE, are user-initiative ones (which means that the user initiates all the instances of acquisition). The Boas module of the Expedition system (whose conception and content was developed largely by ILIT members while at NMSU CRL) is an example of a system-initiative knowledge acquisition environment in which the system leads the user through the paces of acquiring knowledge. In Boas, it was knowledge about a language. In principle, it can be also knowledge about a field of knowledge. System-initiative knowledge acquisition is an improvement over the user-initiative approach (that was proved insufficient when it failed adequately to support the expert systems of the 1980s). Of course, the ultimate future belongs to automatic knowledge acquisition.

Automating knowledge acquisition

This is a crucial long-term goal of research and development at ILIT.