Ontological Relations from Word Embeddings
This work addresses the problem of building large knowledge models for ontology-related tasks, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The paper investigates whether word embeddings from pre-trained models like BERT can predict ontological relationships such as subsumption, showing that a simple feed-forward architecture achieves promising accuracies with varying generalization abilities.
It has been reliably shown that the similarity of word embeddings obtained from popular neural models such as BERT approximates effectively a form of semantic similarity of the meaning of those words. It is therefore natural to wonder if those embeddings contain enough information to be able to connect those meanings through ontological relationships such as the one of subsumption. If so, large knowledge models could be built that are capable of semantically relating terms based on the information encapsulated in word embeddings produced by pre-trained models, with implications not only for ontologies (ontology matching, ontology evolution, etc.) but also on the ability to integrate ontological knowledge in neural models. In this paper, we test how embeddings produced by several pre-trained models can be used to predict relations existing between classes and properties of popular upper-level and general ontologies. We show that even a simple feed-forward architecture on top of those embeddings can achieve promising accuracies, with varying generalisation abilities depending on the input data. To achieve that, we produce a dataset that can be used to further enhance those models, opening new possibilities for applications integrating knowledge from web ontologies.