Towards a Workbench for Acquisition of Domain Knowledge from Natural Language

In this paper we describe an architecture and functionality of main components of a workbench for an acquisition of domain knowledge from large text corpora. The workbench supports an incremental process of corpus analysis starting from a rough automatic extraction and organization of lexico-semantic regularities and ending with a computer supported analysis of extracted data and a semi-automatic refinement of obtained hypotheses. For doing this the workbench employs methods from computational linguistics, information retrieval and knowledge engineering. Although the workbench is currently under implementation some of its components are already implemented and their performance is illustrated with samples from engineering for a medical domain.