Semantic Control for the Cybersecurity Domain: Investigation on the Representativeness of a Domain-Specific Terminology Referring to Lexical Variation

193 Pages·2022·5.543 MB·English

by  Claudia Lanza

Semantic Control for
the Cybersecurity
Domain
This book presents the creation of a bilingual thesaurus (Italian and English), and
its conversion into an ontology system, oriented to the Cybersecurity field of knowl-
edge term management and the identification of a replicable method over other spe-
cialized areas of study, through computational linguistics procedures, to a statistical
and qualitative measurement of the terminological coverage threshold a controlled
vocabulary is able to guarantee with respect to the semantic richness proper to the
domain under investigation. The volume empowers readers to compile and study
significant corpora documentations to support the text mining tasks and to establish
a representativeness evaluation of the information retrieved. Through a description
of several techniques belonging to the field of linguistics and knowledge engineering,
this monograph provides a methodological account on how to enhance and update
semantic monitoring tools reflecting a specialized lexicon as that of Cybersecurity
to grant a reference semantic structure for domain-sector text classification tasks.
This volume is a valuable reference to scholars of corpus-based studies,
terminology, ICT, documentation and librarianship studies, text processing
research, and distributional semantics area of interest as well as for professionals
involved in Cybersecurity organizations.

Semantic Control for
the Cybersecurity
Domain
Investigation on the
Representativeness of a
Domain-Specific Terminology
Referring to Lexical Variation
Claudia Lanza
First edition published 2023
by CRC Press
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© 2023 Claudia Lanza
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ISBN: 978-1-032-25080-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-25081-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28145-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.1201/9781003281450
Typeset in CMR10
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Publisher’s note: This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by the authors.
Contents
ListofFigures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
ListofTables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Corpuslinguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1 Corpusrepresentativeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.2 Thesauritermrepresentativeness . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.1.3 Corpusdesign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2 Textmining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.1 Datapre-processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.3 Terminologicalknowledgebases(TBK) . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.3.1 Automatictermextraction(ATE) . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.3.2 Goldstandardsreference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.3.3 Domain-dependency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.3.4 Termspopulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2 Casestudy:Cybersecuritydomain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.1 OCSproject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2 Specializedlanguagesreflectingspecializeddomains . . . . . . 25
2.3 Cybersecurityfieldofknowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.4 CorpusdesignforCybersecuritydomaininItalianlanguage . . 29
2.5 ExistingresourcesforCybersecuritydomain . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.5.1 Italianresources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
v
vi (cid:4) Contents
2.5.2 Englishresources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.6 Groupofexpertssupervision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3 Relatedworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.1 KOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.1.1 Thesauri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.1.2 Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.2 Semanticconversions–fromthesauritoontologies . . . . . . . 48
3.3 SKOSssystems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.4 Researchapproaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.4.1 Clusteringapproaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.4.2 Keyphrasesextraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.4.3 NLPapproachesforbuildingsemanticstructures . . . . 54
3.4.3.1 Distributionalsimilarity . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4 Researchmethodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4.1 Corpusconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4.1.1 Documentsselection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.1.2 Software-aidedterminologicalextractions–Firstselec-
tion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.1.2.1 T2K–Linguistic-orientedtool . . . . . . . . 71
4.1.2.2 TermSuite. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.1.2.3 Pke-keyphrasesdetection . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.1.2.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4.2 Candidatetermsselection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.2.1 Frequencycriterion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.2.2 Mappingwithgoldstandards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.2.3 Expertsupportsystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
4.3 Automatizationofthesaurusconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.3.1 Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.3.2 Variants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
4.3.3 Patterns-based . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
4.3.3.1 Causativerelations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
4.3.3.2 Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
4.3.3.3 Synonyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
4.3.4 Wordembeddingsdetection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
5 SemantictoolsforCybersecurity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
5.1 ConstructionofItalianCybersecuritythesaurus . . . . . . . . . 105
5.1.1 Semanticrelationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.1.1.1 Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.1.1.2 Equivalence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.1.1.3 Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Contents (cid:4) vii
5.1.1.4 Scopenotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
5.2 Ontologyconversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
5.2.1 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
6 Semanticenhancementandnewperspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
6.1 Multilingualalignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
6.2 Monitoringofterminologicalrepresentativeness . . . . . . . . 129
7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

List of Figures
1 PhDresearchphases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi
1.1 Approachesforcorpusrepresentativeness. . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1 StatisticsOCSwebsite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.2 MeSHtreeviewforvirus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.3 Hierarchyoflaws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.4 CybersercurityNationalstructureasreportedintheWhiteBook
onCybersecurity(2018:18)[147] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.1 KOSdiagramclassification[127] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4.1 Magazines from Ulrich’s web and BNCF for the Cybesecurity
domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.2 Resultsoftermhoodmeasures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.3 Synthesisofthemainfirstcandidatetermswithreferencetothe
sharedknowledgecontainedintheevaluationlists . . . . . . . . 89
4.4 Newtermsderivedbythecollaborationwiththegroupofexperts 91
4.5 ComparisonofRTinthesaurusandpatternspathsoutputs . . . . 96
5.1 Subjectcategoryandbroaderterm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.2 Cybersecurityhierarchicalstructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.3 Equivalentterms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
5.4 Relatedterms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
5.5 ScopeNotesfortermsinthethesaurus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.6 Ontology graph for the Italian Cybersecurity thesaurus conver-
sion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
5.7 Thesaurus representation of the semantic relationship that de-
scribesopposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
ix