[Corpora-List] Author+'s plans for books

[D.G.Damle]

I am trying to learn ontologies from text.  Evaluation is a problem,
since if you ask people to read the text and then to evaluate the
automatically generated ontology; every reader's concept structure may
be different.  The variation amongst readers may be too great!  

It is also difficult to have such an ontology marked by domain experts.
What the domain experts know about the domain may not be reflected in
the text and so Rrecall is particularly difficult.  Also, evaluators may
not be willing to read large texts.

Does the ontology defined by the author(s) of a large text constitute a
more objective yardstick?  Do authors have a list of concepts and
possibly some notion of structure about the text they set out to create?
(I am thinking particularly of textbooks).  Do any authors commit
something like a concept structure to paper or a computer documentbefore
they write the text?  Alternatively, is it likely that an author could
retrospectively  construct such a plan, notwithstanding the issues of
memory lapses etc.

Do any authors have such plans and the texts they wrote using those
plans in an electronic form which they would be happy to make available
for research?  What do list members who write textbooks, do?

Do list members have any views about this evaluation methodology?

Dileep Damle

PhD student
Open University
Milton Keybws
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