Feedback from F5

I am certainly aware that there are more technical NLP aspects in general. However, the nature of the assignment is to discuss incremental progress, primarily using two papers. Those two papers present overall systems of ontology extraction. In particular, the authors of the papers are not advancing some novel NLP algorithms as the primary contributions, discussing them in detail. If I were to focus on NLP aspects, these would not be the right papers; and I am not as much into NLP as into ontology per se. One of the Maedche and Saab's papers I cited has over 2,000 citations. I am fairly sure that at least back in the time there was something novel in their idea about the framework. Also, discussion of supporting technical aspects themselves seem to be more appropriate for topic articles or to be relegated to sources mentioned in the "Build on" section, given the nature of the task.

EDIT: in hindsight, I may have given the wrong impression that ontology extraction solely concerns natural language texts. The paper by Maedche and Saab I mentioned in particular concerns the semantic web, and also Gaeta et al mentions that they might explore other sources of knowledge as well. The former authors seem to do only shallow parsing; I suppose that developing sophisticated natural language parser might not necessarily be useful in handling other forms of information. It might be an interesting topic, albeit unrelated to the task I worked in relation to the two papers, in its own right: what algorithms enable such a system to extract conceptual structures, and how they compare with full fledged NLP algorithms. Anyways, the big picture I am interested in is the one that construes knowledge base as an interface between queries (natural language processing side, which eventually yields first order logic queries on the knowledge base) and the knowledge extraction side, which includes ontology construction from web sources. I first saw this picture in CPSC 422, and it is in the second slide set I added in the "Build on" section. The side I am especially interested in is the latter, out of the two -- it is the entire picture that seems to hold something that can reveal the nature of the relationship between language and the world.

Although I do not agree with all points you made, I acknowldge that they are well articulated criticism.