An Approach to Knowledge Acquisition Based on Verbal Semantics

This work presents an approach to knowledge acquisition based on semantic classification of verbs as a tool to knowledge management. It allows the extraction of propositions, concepts and non-taxonomic relations from a domain. It also allows a systematic understanding of the knowledge construction process, based on systems thinking and energy flows. We argue that this type of extraction may facilitate the understanding of the structure of cognitive processes and contribute to knowledge extraction in several areas that use representation, storage, transfer and flow of knowledge as a resource. Our experiments show that the proposed approach may extract processual knowledge and represent it in a causal concept map, guaranteeing, as much as possible, the accuracy of the acquired knowledge, by minimizing the distance between the knowledge agent's domain and what the knowledge engineer is capable of extracting.