Princípios metodológicos para a construção de uma ontologia baseada na semântica de frames

Abstract

This thesis presents a methodology for the construction of domain ontologies based on the theory of Semantic Frames (FILLMORE, 1982). The proposed methodology reinterprets existents methodologies, but grounded in the concept of semantic frames (scenes of its participants and different roles) for the description of meanings. The main objective of this research lies in reflecting on the similarities between ontologies (GRUBER, 1996; GUARINO, 1998) and frames in order to believe that the combination of these two ways of organizing knowledge ensures the most accurate representation of legal domain concepts. The proposal assumes the inclusion of information of frames, especially those related to the different roles that scene participants may assume, is capable of providing a detailed description of domain concepts and thus provide more meaning to the ontology. The methodology provides five steps that correspond to the ontology life cycle, but are focused on the conceptualization stage, in which describes the domain concepts through the use of frames. A pilot ontology was built based on the Special Criminal Courts context, whose cases proceed through at first instance and account for crimes of lesser offensive potential. The study resulted in a linguistic methodology to develop domain ontologies able to expand the description of the concepts, providing detailing of events, its participants and the different roles they assume in order to provide more meaning to the ontological structure, aiming at contributing specially in information retrieval of documents. The evaluation stage of ontology was based on calculation of coverage (recall), getting a score of 84.4% of representable information on the ontological structure, demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed methodology with regard to the identification of relevant information from legal documents