Evaluation of Textual Knowledge Acquisition Tools: a Challenging Task

Abstract

A large effort has been devoted to the development of textual knowledge acquisition (KA) tools, but it is still difficult to assess the progress that has been made. The results produced by these tools are difficult to compare, due to the heterogeneity of the proposed methods and of their goals. Various experiments have been made to evaluate terminological and ontological tools. They show that in terminology as well as in ontology acquisition, it remains difficult to compare existing tools and to analyse their advantages and drawbacks. From our own experiments in evaluating terminology and ontology acquisition tools, it appeared that the difficulties and solutions are similar for both tasks. We propose a unified approach for the evaluation of textual KA tools that can be instantiated in different ways for various tasks. The main originality of this approach lies in the way it takes into account the subjectivity of evaluation and the relativity of gold standards. In this paper, we highlight the major difficulties of KA evaluation, we then present a unified proposal for the evaluation of terminologies and ontologies acquisition tools and the associated experiments. The proposed protocols take into consideration the specificity of this type of evaluation.

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