  This paper explores the possibility to exploit text on the world wide web in
order to enrich the concepts in existing ontologies. First, a method to
retrieve documents from the WWW related to a concept is described. These
document collections are used 1) to construct topic signatures (lists of
topically related words) for each concept in WordNet, and 2) to build
hierarchical clusters of the concepts (the word senses) that lexicalize a given
word. The overall goal is to overcome two shortcomings of WordNet: the lack of
topical links among concepts, and the proliferation of senses. Topic signatures
are validated on a word sense disambiguation task with good results, which are
improved when the hierarchical clusters are used.
