Restructuring WordNet's Top-Level: The OntoClean approach

Abstract

In this paper we propose an analysis and a rearrangement of WordNet's top-level taxonomy of nouns. We briefly review WordNet and identify its main semantic limitations, in the light of the ontology evaluation principles lying at the core of the OntoClean methodology. Then we briefly present a first version of the OntoClean Top (OCT) ontology, and show how WordNet can be aligned with it. The result is a “cleaned-up” WordNet, which is meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.