Learning New Relations from Concept Ontologies Derived from Definitions

Systems that build general knowledge bases from concept definitions mostly focus on knowledge extraction techniques on a per-definition basis. But, definitions rely on subtext and other definitions to concisely encode a concept's meaning. We present a probabilistic inference process where we systematically augment knowledge extracted from several WordNet glosses with subtext and then infer likely states of the world. From those states we learn new semantic relations among properties, states, and events. We show that our system learns more relations than one without subtext and verify this knowledge using human evaluators.