Applying the lexical constructional model to ontology building

Knowledge acquisition strategies based on lexico-syntactic patterns have shown to significantly contribute to the automatic identification of concepts and relations from texts, but have not investigated how to represent that information in ontologies. Since this is one of the most critical steps in ontology building, we propose to establish a correspondence between lexico-syntactic patterns, specifically verbal patterns representing taxonomic and meronymic relations, and their corresponding ontological structures represented by Ontology Design Patterns. In this way, the transformation of linguistic expressions into ontological structures could be automated and it would support domain experts in the development of ontologies. In order to reliably establish this correspondence, we need to dissect the meaning of predicates. For this aim, we rely on the Lexical Constructional Model, as a comprehensive theory of meaning construction. In this contribution we demonstrate how such a model permits to identify the ontological structure(s) that better capture the meaning of predicates in an ontological resource.