Utilizing Temporal Information for Taxonomy Construction
Published
2016-12-27
Anh Tuan Luu
,
Siu Cheung Hui
,
See Kiong Ng
Anh Tuan Luu
Institute for Infocomm Research
Siu Cheung Hui
Nanyang Technological University
See Kiong Ng
Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore
Abstract
Taxonomies play an important role in many applications by organizing domain knowledge into a hierarchy of ‘is-a' relations between terms. Previous work on automatic construction of taxonomies from text documents either ignored temporal information or used fixed time periods to discretize the time series of documents. In this paper, we propose a time-aware method to automatically construct and effectively maintain a taxonomy from a given series of documents pre-clustered for a domain of interest. The method extracts temporal information from the documents and uses a timestamp contribution function to score the temporal relevance of the evidence from source texts when identifying the taxonomic relations for constructing the taxonomy. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by increasing F-measure up to 7%-20%. Furthermore, the proposed method can incrementally update the taxonomy by adding fresh relations from new data and removing outdated relations using an information decay function. It thus avoids rebuilding the whole taxonomy from scratch for every update and keeps the taxonomy effectively up-to-date in order to track the latest information trends in the rapidly evolving domain.
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