1. A method for populating an ontology with content for use in creating a virtual personal assistant (“VPA”) computer application for a domain of interest, the VPA application executable to determine a likely intended goal of a computing device user based on conversational natural language input of the computing device user, execute a task on behalf of the computing device user, and formulate a likely appropriate system response to the conversational natural language input, the method comprising, with a computing system: obtaining the content in an automated fashion from one or more Internet web pages that support electronic interactions with computing device users relating to items in the domain of interest; analyzing the content using the ontology, the ontology defining a computerized structure for representing knowledge relating to one or more domains, each domain referring to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA computer application may conduct a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user; determining a characteristic that the content has in common with at least a portion of the ontology; and defining a data relationship between the content and the ontology based on the common characteristic.