Taxonomy Builder: a Data-driven and User-centric Tool for Streamlining Taxonomy Construction

An existing domain taxonomy for normalizing content is often assumed when discussing approaches to information extraction, yet often in real-world scenarios there is none.When one does exist, as the information needs shift, it must be continually extended. This is a slow and tedious task, and one which does not scale well.Here we propose an interactive tool that allows a taxonomy to be built or extended rapidly and with a human in the loop to control precision. We apply insights from text summarization and information extraction to reduce the search space dramatically, then leverage modern pretrained language models to perform contextualized clustering of the remaining concepts to yield candidate nodes for the user to review. We show this allows a user to consider as many as 200 taxonomy concept candidates an hour, to quickly build or extend a taxonomy to better fit information needs.