Hyponymy - Automatically Finding Hypernyms

Automatically Finding Hypernyms

Hypernym/hyponym (sometimes termed Inclusion) pairs can be found in text corpora by looking for certain syntactic patterns. One of the first suggestions on how to find hypernym/hyponym pairs in a text came from Marti Hearst, who suggested looking at the output of a parser and taking all of the terms linked by constructions such as X and other Y; X could be considered a possible hyponym of Y. This method was extended by Snow et al., who developed an automated method of finding possible constructions that could signal such a pair.

Their process works by taking hypernym/hyponym pairs from WordNet and finding many noun-noun pairs from a parsed text corpus. They train a classifier to select those pairs of words that have a high probability of being hypernym pairs given the constructions which link the terms in the corpus.

Wikipedia has been used as a corpus for hyponymy relation acquisition.

While, Costa and Seco (2008) proposed an approach based on query reformulation patterns to extract hypernyms from web logs.