Taxonomies:Hidden but Critical Tools

Marjorie M.K. HlavaPresident

Access Innovations, Inc.

Industry in change

• Technology changes• Evolving standards• Mergers• New buzzwords• Hard to tell what is real

Popular Misconceptions• Computers can do it all• No need to index• No need for thesauri or subject headings• Full text gives all we need• Automatic full text• User friendly search engines• Search engines are indexes• User profiles provide the right context• Data filters give right answers

Some of it is true

• What can we use?• Automatic - semi - classification• Depends…..• Size of collection• Cost of the effort

What’s in??• Taxonomies

– thesauri– hierarchies - classification– categorization– browsing

• Wellformedness• Bricks and mortar, i.e., profit

Options for Access/Control

• Keep track of the input– Thesaurus– Authority file

• Maximize the access– Search engine– Browse list

• Power of the word– McCain

What do we need?

• The basics...• Authority file

– People, places, things

• Taxonomy– Thesaurus* with authority file or document

instance

• “Automatic” Classification

Thesaurus Construction

• Parts of a whole• Noun and noun phrases• People, places, things• Actions and reactions• Concepts and processes

Term Records -Thesaurus - format

• Main Entries• Top Terms - TT• Broader Terms - BT • Narrower Terms - NT• Scope Notes - SN• History - HI• Date Term - added/changed - DA

Thesaurus - Format

• Related Terms - RT• See - S• See Also - SA• Use - U• Use For - UF

• “Wellformedness” = W3C

What are the parts?

• Natural Language Processing• Term forms• Term Relationships• Term Associations

Natural Language Processing

• Morphological• Lexical Analysis• Syntactic• Numerical• Phraseological• Semantic Analysis• Pragmatic

Seven Major Parts of NLP

1. Morphological– plural– past tense to present

Seven Major Parts of NLP

2. Lexical Analysis– part of speech tagging

3. Syntactic analysis– non phrase id– proper name boundary

Seven Major Parts of NLP

4. Numeric concept boundary5. Semantic analysis

– Proper name concept categorization– Numeric concept categorization– Semantic relation extraction

6. Phraseological - discourse analysis – Text structure identification

Seven Major Parts of NLP

7. Pragmatic analysis– Cause and effect relationships– Nurse and nursing– Common sense reasoning (buy possess)– Who has x ? – These are the people who brought you.....

Say it another way

• Term standardization• Term forms• Term relationships• Term associations• Rule building / domain creation

Word Standardization

• Split out chemical & drug terms– Separates chemical & drug terms for special treatment

• Split out homonyms, non-English terms, and authority terms

– Separates objects, proper names, place names, and dates for special treatment

• Run spelling standardization program– Identifies variant spellings

Word Standardization

•Run word standardization program– ie, ing, -ed, -s, es, pre-, non-, and “-”

• Match preferred terms and synonyms

Term Forms

• Noun• Adjective• Verb, adverb• Singular, plural• Initial articles• Spelling variants

Term Forms

• Punctuation• Capitalization• Abbreviations

Term Relationships

• Generic• Hierarchical• Systematic• Alphabetic• Instance• Poly-hierarchical

Term Associations

• Cross references• All and some rule• Associative terms• Related terms

“Rule building”* process

• Put terms in context• Group like categories• Consider relationships• Standardize variants • Meld to a single concept rule• How much is really automatic???

Domains

• Taxonomy• Term Record - thesaurus• Hierarchical Browse-able list

• Handout in Booth 150

What else can we have?• Proximity• Stemming (lemmatization)• Truncation• Statistical clustering• Bayesian and others

Other terms and tools

• Neural networks• Word normalization• Lexical (word) networks• Distance mapping• Pattern recognition

Moving toward the search engines

• Term weighting• Frequency counts• Relevance • Precision • Recall

Classification of

• Evolving model…• Noun Extractors• Rule Based Systems• Semantic Processors• Fuzzy Search Systems• Filtering Systems

“Automatic Classification Systems”

(Semi) Automatic Indexing

• Basic theories• Thesaurus construction• Natural language processing• Domain specific

Noun extractors• Noun Extractors• Use stop word list and frequency counts

– Semio – Word Perfect 5.0– Recon

• Prebuilt domains– Autonomy– Net Owl– Newsindexer

Rules Based Systems

• Rule Based– Data Harmony– API– DTIC– Mapit

Semantic Processors

• Synth Bank• n-Stein - expected• Quiver - beta

Fuzzy Search Systems

• Dr. Link• Sovereign Hill

Filtering Systems

• Screaming Media• Data Harmony

New Directions• Topic Maps - TAO

– Topic– Associations– Occurrences

• Relational Indexing• Index Visualization• Based on term records• Add the search engines….

What’s a user to do?

• Enjoy the presentation

• What about a database producer?– Look the options,– Build from the basics– Evaluate the new tools– See it work before you buy

• Give me your card I will email the presentation tonight

Thank You

• Marjorie M.K. Hlava• President, Access Innovations, Inc.• www.accessinn.com• Chairman, Data Harmony • mhlava@accessinn.com• 505-998-0800• Booth 150