Working Towards Ontology Generation from Contextof Listening to Presentations
Yuki Matsuoka, Ikki Ohmukai, and Hideaki Takeda
The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, National Institute of Informatics{m-yuki, i2k, takeda}@nii.ac.jp

Abstract. Many studies have been conducted concerning ontology generation fromthe tags of social tagging services and some tagging services target academic
literature. We think that it is unsuitable to search for technical information using thegenerated ontology from these tags, because they are often taken directly from thecontents. In order to obtain contextual information on the papers, we focused on thenotes taken when users listen to a presentation. We implemented and applied a system
where the participants can input two kinds of memos on Web pages for presentations
at conferences. As a result of this operation, we obtained words related to the content
of the papers and to the background knowledge and research details.

1

Introduction

Social tagging services like del.io.us have recently become very popular. Thereare even social tagging services for scholarly information like CiteULike andBibSonomy. Some studies have been made on ontology generation based on socialtaggings [1][2][3]. This means that tags are used for a semantic understanding of thecontents. Tags are useful information, but they are often taken directly from thecontents themselves. Users sometimes need extra information from the contents tobetter understand professional documents, such as technical papers.
We propose a new method that gathers useful words from the memos written
about presented papers. These memos are written by people who have listened to thepresentations at a conference. The presenters may use some important words related
to the content of their papers even if they are not written in the paper. Moreover, users
may hit on words related to the content of the literature by using their backgroundknowledge when they listen to the presentation. We implemented and applied thesystem, which we call “memoQ” [4], with which participants can input two kinds ofmemos on the Web pages for a presentation at the conference.

2Operation of the system

The memoQ system anonymously publishes the memos that include a “?” asquestion memos, and keeps other memos private as personal memos. We offered thesystem as a part of the support system for the 21st annual conference for the JapaneseSociety for Artificial Intelligence 2007, which was held from June 20th to 22nd, 2007.
We targeted Web pages that included information on the papers presented at theconference. After the operation, there were 61 participants who input question orpersonal memos. We obtained 2556 memos (1849 question memos and 707 personalmemos). There were 2836 nouns in the question memos, of which 1383 of them werewritten in the literatures (48.8%). Also, there were 1968 nouns in the personal memos,of which 1189 of them were written in the literatures (60.4%). The personal memos
had a higher ratio of nouns written in the literatures, because the participants tended toinput their personal memos as conference notes.
We investigated the question and personal memos input in the session for the“semantic Web” at the conference. The nouns in the personal memos that were notwritten in the papers include words like “OWL” and “BLAST”. “OWL” was a wordthat the presenter used to describe ontology. In addition, “BLAST” was a kind of
bioinformatics Web service that the presenter spoke of. On the other hand, the nouns
in the question memos that were not written in the papers included words like“primitive task” and “maintenance”. The words “primitive task” were used by aquestioner about the task resolution of Web services, and the word “maintenance”
was used by a questioner about the maintenance of ontology. In this way, the words
related to the content of the papers were found as personal memos and the words
concerning the background knowledge and research details were found as question
memos. In other sessions, a similar tendency was seen.

3Conclusion and Future work

We propose gathering useful words from two kinds of memos input into a system
when users listen to presentations at academic conferences. According to the system,
the words related to the content of the literature were included in the personal memos
and the words about the research techniques were included in the question memos.
We found that the types of words input into the memos were different between thememos, based on question use and personal use. Our future work is to find thesemantic relationship between the words in these memos.

References
1. Mika, P., Ontologies are us: A Unified Model of Social Networks and Semantics, in:Proceedings of the 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005), 2005.
2. Xian Wu, Lei Zhang, and Yong Yu: Exploring social annotations for the semantic web, in:Proceedings of 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2006), 2006
3. L. Specia and E. Motta: Integrating Folksonomies with the Semantic Web, in: Proceedings ofthe European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2007), 2007.
4. Yuki Matsuoka, Ikki Ohmukai, and Hideaki Takeda, Collaborative Memo-based System in
the Academic Conference, IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2007(ICWI2007),2007 (to appear)