Taxonomies and ChatGPT

ChatGPT, generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) are hot topics of interest in fields of data, information, and knowledge management. LLMs dominated the keynote presentations at the networking conversations at Knowledge Graph Conference in New York and were also discussed in presentations and panels of this conference and Data Summit in Boston, both of which I attended this month. The technology is relevant to taxonomies as well.

ChatGPT is the user interface application on top of GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), a publicly available LLM developed by OpenAI, which is now in version 4. ChatGPT is thus a form of generative AI, in how it generates answers. There are many other LLMs (Neural network-based AI, trained with deep learning on very large volumes of text), including those which are proprietary, restricted, or for non-commercial research, but only some have generative AI user interfaces. Although we may think of generative AI for providing answers to questions, it can do a lot more, including tasks related to taxonomies.

Organizing terms into hierarchies

Building a taxonomy is a combination of top-down design (identifying the top concepts or facets) and bottom-up building (identifying specific concepts from content analysis). The top-level of a taxonomy is designed to serve user needs and thus should be based on stakeholder interviews, surveys, and brainstorming workshops, which is not something ChatGPT can do.  The bottom-up building a taxonomy, based on terms extracted content or search log terms, may benefit from some AI involvement.

I have made a few test requests of ChatGPT for “Put the following list of terms into a hierarchical taxonomy…,” and the results are bulleted lists with indented narrower concepts. ChatGPT can also generate a taxonomy in a machine-readable SKOS in a requested RDF serialization format, as Bob DuCharme explained in his May 20 blog post “Getting ChatGPT to turn a flat vocabulary list into a hierarchical taxonomy.”

Like card sorting exercises, you can specify the top categories/concepts (like a “closed card sort”), or you can let ChatGPT create the top categories (like an “open card sort”). In any case, better results are with context, of course, so you should also tell ChatGPT what the subject domain or context is. Asking for a hierarchical taxonomy results in a third level of hierarchy sometimes, and not just a single level of grouping. Near duplicates usually appear next to each other in the list, and the taxonomist can then decide if and how to merge them into a single concept.

It is particularly for long lists of terms, where automated methods can save the taxonomist’s time. If a taxonomist comes up with terms based on manual content analysis, stakeholder interviews, or submitted lists from subject matter experts, the term lists tend not to be very long, and even the process of coming up with the terms tends to include some thoughts toward categorization at the same time. Longer term lists (such several hundred) are derived from automated term extraction (using text analytics technologies) across a corpus of dozens or hundreds of documents and from search log reports. ChatGPT is practical for putting these long lists of terms into draft hierarchies. There are inevitably some taxonomic errors in the results, which should be obvious to any taxonomist. For example, I have seen duplicated terms on different levels of the hierarchy.

In both lists of extracted terms and search log lists, terms occur that are not suitable as concepts for a taxonomy, such as verbs and adjectives or vague words. ChatGPT understands grammatical rules, so my prompt also says “Include in the taxonomy only nouns and noun phrases and omit the other terms.”

Generating alternative labels (“synonyms”) for concepts

Asking ChatGPT to “provide a list of synonyms for…” a given term can also be helpful for coming up with alternative labels for taxonomy concepts. Alternative labels should be customized for the context of the content and users, so alternative labels for a concept will vary from one taxonomy to another, and an external source, such as ChatGPT should not relied upon as the only source for alternative labels, but merely as a supplemental source of suggestions to be considered. 

Again, context can help and should be provided. I asked “Provide a list of synonyms for “healthcare” and got 20 terms. But then when I asked “Provide a list of synonyms for health care, meaning the industry,” I received a slightly more focused list of 15 terms. Interestingly, the two-word variant “health care” was not on the list, so “synonyms” is understood by ChatGPT to mean different words with the same meaning and not orthographic variations. Nevertheless, even 15 terms are too many, and the taxonomist should select from the list of suggestions. It might be a good idea to then test search the suggested alternative labels in the content and system being used.

Although by strict definition a “synonym” is a single word with the same meaning as another word, ChatGPT provides acceptable synonyms for terms which are multi-word phrases, or synonymous multi-word phrases, such as “Chemical manufacturing and distribution” provided as a synonym for “chemical industry.”

Other taxonomy-related uses of ChatGPT

Getting help in designing an ontology (a more complex, yet high-level semantic model with defined classes of concepts, customized relationships, and attributes) is also possible with ChatGPT or other LLMs. Again, submitting the request multiple times with slight variations will yield multiple different responses for the ontologist to consider and select ideas from. Ontologies are not expressed in simple text, though, so the prompt request should specify it, such as RDF TTL. Dean Allemang, author of Semantic Web or the Working Ontologist, has written multiple articles (medium.com/@dallemang) recently on ChatGPT and ontologies/knowledge graphs.

ChatGPT can also be used for comparing lists of terms, data conversion, and basic coding, which may be useful for taxonomists who lack coding skills. It can convert taxonomy or ontology data from one data format to another (although taxonomy/ontology management software also imports/exports in multiple formats). Taxonomies and ontologies in their raw data format are most commonly expressed in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model which has various serialization format: RDF/XML, JSON, JSON- LD, .ttl (Turtle), etc., and ChatGPT can convert data from one to another. Data extraction can also be done with ChatGPT. For example, knowledge management professional Camille Mathieu recently shared in a LinkedIn post how she used ChatGPT to write a Python script to extract text & metadata from PDFs.

Perhaps what is most intriguing as a future implementation of taxonomies and ChatGPT is to go in the other direction and have knowledge organization systems, such as taxonomies, support the creation and use of queries (as called “prompts”) for generative AI, to obtain better results. This requires some back-end development, though, and is not merely a matter of putting a taxonomy into a prompt.  Since a taxonomy is created for a specific subject domain, the questions need to be confined to the domain of the taxonomy. Semantic Web Company has developed a simple publicly accessible demo “PoolParty Meets Chat GPT,” whereby you can compare the results of questions you ask in the subject area of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) that are submitted directly to ChatGPT and with those which are filtered through an ESG taxonomy and knowledge graph (managed in PoolParty software) so that the questions are enriched before being sent to ChatGPT. The semantically enriched questions generate answers that have more detail, better accuracy, and even web links to definitions and other articles.

Conclusions

While it’s arguable whether ChatGPT alone is a good way to obtain “facts,” there is no doubt that it is a good way to get suggestions and ideas. These suggestions can support the work of taxonomists and ontologists, and taxonomies and ontologies in turn can support the results of ChatGPT and other LLMs. Because there will be errors from ChatGPT, it should not be used to generate taxonomies by those who are not already knowledgeable with taxonomy requirements and best practices, nor should it be used as a substitute for the expertise of taxonomists.

I hope to experiment more with ChatGPT for taxonomies and share additional details in future blog posts.