Ontology Matching Method Based on Deep Learning and Syntax
Jiawei Lu, Changfeng Yan · Big Data and Cognitive Computing · 2025
Ontology technology addresses data heterogeneity challenges in Internet of Everything (IoE) systems enabled by Cyber Twin and 6G, yet the subjective nature of ontology engineering often leads to differing definitions of the same concept across ontologies, resulting in ontology heterogeneity. To solve this problem, this study introduces a hybrid ontology matching method that integrates a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with syntax-based analysis. The method first extracts representative entities by leveraging in-degree and out-degree information from ontological tree structures, which reduces training noise and improves model generalization. Next, a matching framework combining RNN and N-gram is designed: the RNN captures medium-distance dependencies and complex sequential patterns, supporting the dynamic optimization of embedding parameters and semantic feature extraction; the N-gram module further captures local information and relationships between adjacent characters, improving the coverage of matched entities. The experiments were conducted on the OAEI benchmark dataset, where the proposed method was compared with representative baseline methods from OAEI as well as a Transformer-based method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieved an 18.18% improvement in F-measure over the best-performing baseline. This improvement was statistically significant, as validated by the Friedman and Holm tests. Moreover, the proposed method achieves the shortest runtime among all the compared methods. Compared to other RNN-based hybrid frameworks that adopt classical structure-based and semantics-based similarity measures, the proposed method further improved the F-measure by 18.46%. Furthermore, a comparison of time and space complexity with the standalone RNN model and its variants demonstrated that the proposed method achieved high performance while maintaining favorable computational efficiency. These findings confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the method in addressing ontology heterogeneity in complex IoE environments.