Seoul National University

Graduate Student, Linguistics

Member of Computational Linguistics Lab

Humanities College

Thesis Title: The KOLON System: an Object-Oriented Framework as a Tool for Ontological Research

About

Ontologies have been playing an important role not only in the field of Natural Language Processing, but also with the advent of the so-called semantic web. It has been a hot issue in the academic world for already some years. A great number of ontologies about almost all fields of human knowledge have been built or are currently under development. However, most of the work is done in or about English since few ontologies have been written in other languages. The KOLON Ontology has been trying to fill in the gap when it comes to the Korean language, mapping the elements of two large works, the Mikrokosmos Ontology and the 21st Century Sejong Electronic Dictionary, into one large knowledge base having Korea under its aim. This thesis presents and analyzes the KOLON System, created to facilitate Korean Natural Language Processing (KNLP) and to improve experimental results through the KOLON Ontology. It is currently under development at the Seoul National University Computational Linguistics Laboratory, and is based on previous works, namely the Mikrokosmos Ontology and 21st Century Sejong Project. The KOLON System is also extended with software tools to simplify the handling and visualization of the data, as well as the creation of new programs. The mapping of words onto ontological concepts was performed automatically, with faulty information being corrected manually. In order to examine the effectiveness of using KOLON’s data, a previous sentiment analysis (SA) experiment was executed one more time, changing the approach to include data from the ontology. This new experiment obtained improved results, which is a strong indication that the project will be of use after its completion.