Semi-Automatic Generation of Active Ontologies from Web Forms for Intelligent Assistants

Intelligent assistants are becoming widespread. A popular method for creating intelligent assistants is modeling the domain (and thus the assistant's capabilities) as Active Ontology. Adding new functionality requires extending the ontology or building new ones; as of today, this process is manual. We describe an automated method for creating Active Ontologies for arbitrary web forms. Our approach leverages methods from natural language processing and data mining to synthesize the ontologies. Furthermore, our tool generates the code needed to process user input. We evaluate the generated Active Ontologies in three case studies using web forms of the domains airfare, automobile, and book search all of them taken from the UIUC Web Integration Repository. First, we examine how much of the generation process can be automated and how well the approach identifies domain concepts and their relations. Second, we test how well the generated Active Ontologies handle end-user input to perform the desired actions. Our evaluation shows that Easier automatically generates 65% of an Active Ontology's sensor nodes and is able to correctly answer 70% of the queries.