Language Models as Ontology Encoders

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yang, Hui, Chen, Jiaoyan, He, Yuan, Gao, Yongsheng, Horrocks, Ian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915400557527040
author Yang, Hui
Chen, Jiaoyan
He, Yuan
Gao, Yongsheng
Horrocks, Ian
author_facet Yang, Hui
Chen, Jiaoyan
He, Yuan
Gao, Yongsheng
Horrocks, Ian
contents OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies which are able to formally represent complex knowledge and support semantic reasoning have been widely adopted across various domains such as healthcare and bioinformatics. Recently, ontology embeddings have gained wide attention due to its potential to infer plausible new knowledge and approximate complex reasoning. However, existing methods face notable limitations: geometric model-based embeddings typically overlook valuable textual information, resulting in suboptimal performance, while the approaches that incorporate text, which are often based on language models, fail to preserve the logical structure. In this work, we propose a new ontology embedding method OnT, which tunes a Pretrained Language Model (PLM) via geometric modeling in a hyperbolic space for effectively incorporating textual labels and simultaneously preserving class hierarchies and other logical relationships of Description Logic EL. Extensive experiments on four real-world ontologies show that OnT consistently outperforms the baselines including the state-of-the-art across both tasks of prediction and inference of axioms. OnT also demonstrates strong potential in real-world applications, indicated by its robust transfer learning abilities and effectiveness in real cases of constructing a new ontology from SNOMED CT. Data and code are available at https://github.com/HuiYang1997/OnT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14334
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language Models as Ontology Encoders
Yang, Hui
Chen, Jiaoyan
He, Yuan
Gao, Yongsheng
Horrocks, Ian
Artificial Intelligence
OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies which are able to formally represent complex knowledge and support semantic reasoning have been widely adopted across various domains such as healthcare and bioinformatics. Recently, ontology embeddings have gained wide attention due to its potential to infer plausible new knowledge and approximate complex reasoning. However, existing methods face notable limitations: geometric model-based embeddings typically overlook valuable textual information, resulting in suboptimal performance, while the approaches that incorporate text, which are often based on language models, fail to preserve the logical structure. In this work, we propose a new ontology embedding method OnT, which tunes a Pretrained Language Model (PLM) via geometric modeling in a hyperbolic space for effectively incorporating textual labels and simultaneously preserving class hierarchies and other logical relationships of Description Logic EL. Extensive experiments on four real-world ontologies show that OnT consistently outperforms the baselines including the state-of-the-art across both tasks of prediction and inference of axioms. OnT also demonstrates strong potential in real-world applications, indicated by its robust transfer learning abilities and effectiveness in real cases of constructing a new ontology from SNOMED CT. Data and code are available at https://github.com/HuiYang1997/OnT.
title Language Models as Ontology Encoders
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14334